I’ve heard said that the purpose of a federal government is to provide for the nation’s defense. Ron Paul and his surrender monkeys can still KMA.
You heard correct. That is, it is to defend our nation, not Kuwait or Iraq or whatever. And the one thing we don't do is defend our nation. We have the biggest military in the world and we can't protect our own borders. We spend gazillions on defense and then let a bunch of Muslims overstay their visas (why did we give a Muslim a visa in the first place?) and fly planes into buildings, not to metion promote Muslims to our officer corps where they can shoot our soldiers in America at will.
Seal the border, get energy independent, arm to the teeth, and throw everybody else under the next bus just as soon as it suits us.
You internationalists are Trotskyites and you don't even know it. The Neocons are (mostly) direct political descendents from Lev Brotshein himself (via Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington). You're the ones who are unwittingly trying to graft a virulently Marxist internationalism onto this tree that George Washington planted over 200 years ago. You have naught to do with the authentic American tradition.
Ron Paul embodies that tradition. He's a Taft Republican. That's what all of us Republicans were until Bill Buckley cut a deal with the Trotskyites 20 years or so ago. The fact that a "conservative" forum could find a healthy isolationism controversial says more about the "Marxitis" that infects the modern Neocon movement than about conservatism per se.