| | Joe, in reading your article several questions occured to me, only one of which I have time to address.
To begin, you state:
"Contrast this with the belief that we should only respond when a country becomes a serious threat to the US, possibly even launching an attack. Instead of dealing with a problem when it's minor, the intent is to wait until the threat becomes deadly. "Clear and present danger" is a common phrase here. Instead of efficient utilization of limited means, this would be utilizing those means in the least efficient way, when your choices are the most limited."
Your conviction that "threats" to the United States are likely to morph into aggression against Americans (living in the United States) in the absence of US military adventuring abroad, is an unproven proposition. Of course, no law of nature prevents a "threat" from becoming aggression---especially for smaller vulnerable countries such as Hong Kong or Nationalist China today, or Poland just before World War II. But for the United States, with its enormous productivity and wealth afforded by free enterprise, with its huge area and teeming population, and with the geographical protection afforded by two oceans, the risk of military aggression against our citizenry by a State, for the present, is low.
One should not underestimate the perversity and viciousness of various thugs who run States around the globe, and of the tragic cultures that help them climb to power. These times are not friendly to reason and individual freedom. There is no doubt that the Hitler's and Pol Pot's and bin Laden's would jump at the chance to rule over us, if they could do so in exchange for costs and risks that were tolerable to them. But as long as Americans remain relatively free to produce and pursue life--free from their own statist cultural impulses--the costs and risks to another State of aggression against territorial United States are overwhelming. This is why war hawks often invoke the justification of "vital national interests", as contrasted with "defense", for military adventuring abroad.
The great danger to our freedom is not from abroad; it is the rise of domestic statism. As our freedom to choose becomes ever more restricted, because of state and federal taxes, asset seizures, unjust incarcerations, endless and virtually unknowable regulations, theft by trial lawyers, and growing coercive power that reaches into every aspect of our lives, we lose the ability to take care of and defend ourselves. If America ever falls to a foreign power, the preceeding strangulation of our freedom by domestic statism will usher in the invader. This is why encouraging the growth of state power through military adventuring abroad--with its reckless spending, punitive taxation and monetary inflation, with its aggrandizement of "service" and "duty" to the state, with its censuring and spying on its own citizens, and with its treachery against them---endangers our security in ways that no foreign power ever could. If ever a "clear and present danger" threatened the United States, this is it.
So this leads me, finally, to my question. Since I assume that you favored American entry into World War II to head off a large "threat" to the United States, before the "threat" became overwhelming, how could Americans have achieved your moral objective and remained free? For Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to our invovlement prior to Pearl Harbor, by 85% to 90% margins over a period of a few years. But even if one asssumes that FDR had not purposely provoked and goaded Japan into the attack, or that he had no foreknowlege, how could our government finance the war without punishingly high rates of taxation? How could our government have stormed the islands of the Pacific campaign, or the beaches of Normandy, in which huge percentages of American soldiers were killed and maimed, without resorting to a military draft? In summary, how do you square your support for that war with your belief in individual liberty? (As you know from my past posts, I do not think that Hitler posed a threat to Americans, or that Imperial Japan would have attacked Pearl Harbor if FDR had embraced policies consistent with American neutrality.)
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