| | It might be worth noting Rand's comments on foreign policy, which she made in her Ford Hall Forum speech, "The Wreckage of the Consensus," on April 16, 1967, which was subsequently reprinted in the paperback edition of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She states: [T]here is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam: It is a war we should never have entered. To continue it is senseless--to withdraw from it, would be one more act of appeasement on our long, shameful record. The ultimate result of appeasement is a world war, as demonstrated by World War II; in today's context, it may mean a nuclear world war.
That we let ourselves be trapped into a situation of that kind, is the consequence of fifty years of a suicidal foreign policy. One cannot correct a consequence without correcting its cause; if such disasters could be solved "pragmatically," i.e., out of context, on the spur and range of the moment, a nation would not need any foreign policy. And this is an example of why we do need a policy based on long-range principles, i.e., an ideology. But a revision of our foreign policy, from its basic premises on up, is what today's anti-ideologists dare not contemplate. The worse its results, the louder our public leaders proclaim that our foreign policy is bipartisan.
A proper solution would be to elect statesmen -- if such appeared -- with a radically different foreign policy, a policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defense of America's rights and national self-interests, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation. On such a policy, we could withdraw from Vietnam at once -- and the withdrawal would not be misunderstood by anyone, and the world would have a chance to achieve peace. But such statesmen do not exist at present. In today's conditions, the only alternative is to fight that war and win it as fast as possible -- and thus gain time to develop new statesmen with a new foreign policy, before the old one pushes us into another "cold war," just as the "cold war" in Korea pushed us into Vietnam. (p. 226)
We lost 50,000 American lives in the Vietnam War, due at least in part to the military draft. As Rand observed, "Not many men would volunteer for such wars as Korea or Vietnam. Without the power to draft, the makers of our foreign policy would not be able to embark on adventures of that kind. " (p. 228)
As for World Wars I and II, Rand had this to say: Just as [Woodrow] Wilson, a "liberal" reformer, led the United States into World War I, "to make the world safe for democracy" -- so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another "liberal" reformer, let it into World War II, in the name of the "Four Freedoms." In both cases, the "conservatives" -- and the big-business interests -- were overwhelmingly opposed to war, but were silenced. In the case of World War II, they were smeared as "isolationists," "reactionaries" and "America-First'ers."
World War I led, not to "democracy," but to the creation of three dictatorships; Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, World War II led, not to "Four Freedoms," but to the surrender of one-third of the world's population into communist slavery." ("The Roots of War," The Objectivist, p. 86)
- Bill
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