[jmeagan]

****Historically, the United States and its Western allies have reacted to the aggression of the totalitarians, unless you choose to subscribe to elaborate and unprovable conspiracy theories. Granted, the paleolibertarians are not conspiracists of the Alex Jones school, but they have accepted the leftist foreign policy package. What is scary is watching leftists like Naomi Wolf (a one time Friend of Bill, former adviser to Al Gore and feminist author) and Glenn Greenwald (Salon magazine) favoring or at least speaking well of the Paul campaign.****

Other than France, during the early years of our country, we had no “western allies.” We didn’t participate in any of the European wars in the 1800’s, except to protect our citizens in certain situations. We didn’t do anything when the western European countries were colonizing Africa and parts of the far east in the 1800-1900’s. We were almost completely neutral in WW I until the sinking of the L. While we were not completely neutral in WW II, prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the mood of the country was to stay out of war. FDR ran on an anti-war platform in 1940.

So tell me more about what we and our Western Allies have done, historically.

It is only after WW II that we have decided to be “cops of the World.” Prior to that we confined almost all our actions to the western hemisphere.

[Wallace T.]

The United States is the successor state to the British Empire in terms of being the military and naval leader of the Western world. Our role in the Middle East increased in the mid-1900s as that of the British, which had been involved in the "Great Game" against Russia and the Soviet Union, along with the Ottoman Empire and its successor states for a whole century previously, decreased. Britain suffered from overreach and exhaustion, as a few thousand Boer rebels fought the British to a near standstill for several years in the 1890s and the Irish successfully threw off the British yoke three decades later. After World War II, Britain lost its grip on most of the rest of its old empire, led by India and Pakistan. We may well suffer the same fate as the British did for much the same reasons as they did. Too many of our foreign policy advisers suffer from a hubris reminiscent of the the British in height of the Victorian era, masking self-interest with high minded rhetoric and overestimating American military capacity.

However, you must consider what would have happened had the United States stayed out of World War II. Japan would have dominated South and East Asia, and Germany would have been hegemonic over Europe and the Middle East. Their imperial designs would have led them into the Western Hemisphere, where dictators like Juan Peron, the Hugo Chavez of his day, were pro-Nazi and more than willing to tweak the hated Yankee. Ditto for the post-World War II era. The United States Army was the one barrier that prevented Stalin's hordes from reaching the Atlantic Ocean, fulfilling the dreams of Lenin and Trotsky of a Eurasian Communist superstate.

As far back as the 1890s, America became imperial, effectively developing our own dependent states, such as Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Ironically, some of the Republicans who were strong American Firsters before Pearl Harbor supported American intervention in the so-called banana republics of Central America. Perhaps we should not have become involved in the nations to our south, but our absence may well have invited the European powers to establish a presence in this hemisphere.

A policy of strict neutrality may work for Switzerland or another small nation. In our case, our size and economic impact preclude our ability to be neutral. American failure to assert its power overseas invites nations that are more malevolent than ours to fill the power vacuum. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans do not provide us with the protection they once did. The world would be a far worse place today had the United States not confronted first Germany and Japan, and then the Soviet Union and its satellites.