Posted on 12/21/2014 12:26:07 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Ron and Rand Paul have complained about being wrongly dubbed “isolationists” even though that name arguably fits whatever passes for their foreign policy.
Now Rand Paul has decided that opponents of bailing out the Castro regime are isolationists. All this proves is that Rand Paul doesn’t know what an isolationist is.
“I think a policy of isolationism toward Cuba is misplaced and hasn’t worked,” Paul writes in Time Magazine.
Isolationism is a policy that the United States would adopt toward the larger world. An embargo on an enemy state in response to its actions against the United States is not isolationism.
Rand Paul is trying to talk about foreign policy using terms he doesn’t understand. That’s a problem for a guy who wants to run for president based on a foreign policy that he seems to make up as he goes along.
“I support engagement, diplomacy, and trade with Cuba, China, Vietnam, and many countries with less than stellar human rights records, because I believe that once enslaved people taste freedom and see the products of capitalism they will become hungry for freedom themselves,” Paul writes.
How one might ask, has that worked out in China?
But Rand Paul doesn’t think through the implications of his arguments. Like Obama he delivers smug one-liners and expects the media to tag along. Except it doesn’t work that way for Republicans.
“Communism can’t survive the captivating allure of capitalism. Let’s overwhelm the Castro regime with iPhones, iPads, American cars, and American ingenuity,” Paul writes.
But the Communist Party is still in charge in China. And our iPhones and iPads are made in China. So are a whole lot of our products.
Rand Paul is arguing against a Cold War policy using outdated Cold War arguments that even a child who reads a Made in China label can poke apart.
It’s embarrassing to watch.
“Trade and relations also make it less likely that we ever go to war with China, because the two countries have become economically intertwined,” Paul writes.
Paul ought to tell that to China which is building up its military and keeps threatening to go to war with us. But as usual, Rand Paul isn’t hobbled by the existence of such petty things as ‘facts’ and ‘reality’.
“After 50 years of embargo and no evidence of tyranny losing its grip, maybe it’s time for a new approach,” Paul writes.
Except there was actually plenty of evidence of it. But Rand Paul doesn’t actually pay attention to foreign policy. He makes cynical arguments based on his political calculations. He has no idea what’s going on in Cuba or China and doesn’t care.
Then whatever machine powers Rand Paul begins glitching and this happens…
Doug Bandow, of the CATO Institute writes that proponents of the embargo have it all wrong when they make the fear mongering claim that diplomacy with Cuba will make America less safe. Bandow argues that “America has engaged in years of on-and-off discussions with North Korea’s Kim dynasty stretching back to the Clinton administration. Under President Obama Washington has been negotiating with Iran’s government for months: most people recognize that a diplomatic settlement, no matter how difficult to achieve, would be better than war.”
I don’t see an argument there that shows that negotiating with North Korea and Iran doesn’t make America less safe. The negotiations allowed North Korea to go nuclear. The current negotiations with Iran are doing the same thing.
Whoever writes Rand Paul’s speeches just got bored and began cutting and pasting gibberish from CATO into his articles.
The diplomatic settlement being better than war is a classic Obama argument. It’s also meaningless. A diplomatic settlement is only better than war when it’s a real possibility. When it isn’t, it leads to war on worse terms. See Munich.
“For 70 years we had diplomatic relations with Russia, despite the gulags, despite the atrocities of Stalin and others,” Rand Paul argues.
He seems unaware that opening diplomatic relations with the USSR was controversial, done by a Democrat and led to disastrous results. Like his China argument, it only really shows that Rand Paul knows very little about history.
“Let’s hope cooler heads will ultimately prevail and we unleash a trade tsunami that washes the Castros once and for all into the sea,” Paul concludes.
I hope the intern he didn’t pay to write that had a good time coming up with that line. In the real world, the trade tsunami will keep the Castros in power. Just as it did the Chinese Community Party.
I see no point in trying to remember the exact date of each of those events in your 20 questions game, though I know approximately when each occurred, and I could easily look them up. The point is I remember them all happening other than the first two which were before my time. Because I read and pay attention I know a fair amount about them, as well as pre-communist Chinese history. So being able to list a bunch of events is supposed to prove that your opinion is factual, and I am ignorant? That’s simply asinine.
Those questions review a timeline of events that shows your assertions are false.
The three Republican Presidents in the 1920s (Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover) could reasonably be called isolationist. We did not even intervene in Mexico during that period, even though an anticlerical and socialistic regime in that country confiscated American oil and natural gas holdings. We did intervene in the Caribbean and some of the smaller Central American countries, and cooperated in British and French led intervention in China (see the movie Sand Pebbles as reference) in that period, so it was not absolute isolationism. Harding opposed American entrance into the League of Nations, and neither Coolidge nor Hoover were inclined to recommend our involvement.
During the years preceding Pearl Harbor, opposition to our involvement was centered in the Republican Party, centered in senators like Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft. World War II and the rise of a hostile Communist bloc after V-J Day largely ended isolationist sentiments in the GOP.
On the contrary. My only assertion is that Chinese are freer than they used to be. During the cultural revolution millions were sent to reeducation camps or executed for “bourgeoisie thoughts” ie. believing in private property, individual prosperity and that achievement should be rewarded. Today people can at least own stuff and try to get ahead. That’s more freedom. And there is more prosperity in general. I didn’t say China is a land of liberty. Obviously there is no political freedom, and the party still crushes any threat to their power. But the question I responded to implied there has been no change for the better, which is demonstrably untrue.
Cleveland, maybe. He refused to annex Hawaii. Or maybe Hayes, Garfield, or Arthur, weak presidents in a country that had been weakened by civil war.
Woodrow Wilson supposedly tried for neutrality in WWI. There's some debate about that. How neutral was he going to be when his mother was born in England and all his grandparents were born in Scotland or Ireland? Wouldn't real neutrality have involved not trading or financing parties to the conflict?
But Wilson points up a problem with the idea of isolationism. When he was claiming to be neutral in Europe's war, he was forcefully intervening in Mexico. He had the excuse of Pancho Villa's raid on New Mexico, but even "isolationist" presidents haven't had much trouble getting involved in other countries in our own hemisphere.
About Rand Paul: It's hard to believe that he didn't know what isolationism is after his father's been accused of it so many times by so many people. Three possibilities: 1) Maybe a staffer wrote his article, 2) maybe he's pulling our legs, "reappropriating" the term "isolationist" and applying it to his opponents, or 3) maybe he really didn't know, in which case, what's he doing planning to run for president?
“My only assertion is that Chinese are freer than they used to be.”
Yes, Claimed due to the US rapprochement. I am addressing the mistaken claim made by that US China policy is the cause.
I didn’t make such a claim. I would say cause and effect are interrelated. Many changes were made to make China more competitive on the world market. But they also reflect the historical worldview of the Chinese people, which has always valued innovation and accumulation of wealth, along with obedience to authority. That’s why I consider China not to be a communist state any longer, even if the Party still uses it as a justification for maintain a dictatorship. But they don’t believe that drivel about workers of the world overthrowing the ruling class and creating a world without nation states. They are basically national socialists.
You may disagree, but your assertion that “Your analysis is 99% liberal orthodoxy and has nothing to do with reality” is just insulting nonsense.
Dittos!
Pancho Villa came across the American border, and on March 9, 1916, Villa led several rebels in a raid of Columbus, New Mexico, and killed American citizen non-combatants.
So, in a nutshell, Rand Paul is about as nuts as his father!
Would i vote for him?
Only if he comes and licks my disease-ridden toes!
No Blacks allowed at the top echelons of Cuban nomenclature. In The Longest Romance, Humberto Fontova calculates that between 65,000 and 85,000 people has died trying to escape Cuba, 30 times the number of Berlin Wall casualties. Cuba’s prison population is 90 percent black and includes Eusebio Peñalver, “the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner.” That wasn’t a sticking point for Barack Obama.
So soon we’ll hear some celebrity interviewed on PMSNBC say “Baraq Obama don’t care about black people”?
/s
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