| | Here is a quote from Ron's Paul's lengthy position paper of 2000 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2000/cr020200.htm:
Our attitudes toward foreign policy have dramatically changed since the beginning of the century. From George Washington through Grover Cleveland, the accepted policy was to avoid entangling alliances. Although we spread our wings westward and southward as part of our manifest destiny, in the 19th Century we accepted the Monroe Doctrine notion that Europeans and Asians should stay out of our affairs in this hemisphere and we theirs. McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Spanish American War changed all of that. Our intellectual and political leaders at the turn of the last century brought into vogue the interventionist doctrine setting the stage for the past 100 years of global military activism.
>From a country that once minded its own business, we now find ourselves with military personnel in more than 130 different countries, protecting our modern-day American empire. Not only do we have troops spread to the four corners of the earth, we find Coast Guard Cutters in the Mediterranean and around the world, our FBI in any country we choose, and the CIA in places the Congress doesn't even know about.
It is a truism that the state grows and freedom is diminished in times of war. Almost perpetual war in the 20th Century has significantly contributed to steadily undermining our liberties while glorifying the state. In addition to the military wars, liberty has also suffered from the domestic "wars" on poverty, literacy, drugs, homelessness, privacy, and many others.
We have, in the last 100 years, gone from the accepted and cherished notion of a sovereign nation to one of a globalist, New World Order. As we once had three separate branches of our government, the United Nations proudly uses its three branches, the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization to work their will in this new era of globalism. Because the US is by far the strongest military industrial power, it can dictate the terms of these international institutions, protecting what we see as our various interests such as oil, along with satisfying our military industrial complex. Our commercial interests and foreign policy are no longer separate. This allows for subsidized profits, while the taxpayers are forced to protect huge corporations against any losses from overseas investments. The argument that we go about the world out of humanitarian concerns for those suffering-which was the excuse for bombing Serbia-is a farce.
As bad as it is that average Americans are forced to subsidize such a system, we additionally are placed in greater danger because of our arrogant policy of bombing nations that do not submit to our wishes. This generates the hatred directed toward America, even if at times it seems suppressed, and exposes us to a greater threat of terrorism, since this is the only vehicle our victims can use to retaliate against a powerful military state. ******************************** Probably the paragraphs above reflect Murray Rothbard's foreign policy ideas. But I find almost nothing with which to disagree here: no moral relativism and no twisting of facts. (My only reservation concerns Serbia: I don't know what motivated our military involvement, but I doubt that altruistic or humanitarian concerns were entirely unrelated.) The entrenched American ethos of the nanny-state--with its high taxes, punitive regulations, and anti-capitalist mentality--virtually guarantees that our government will respond to threats from abroad in ways that worsen our prospects. To provide just one example, freeing energy entrepreneuers to create an outpouring of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy--all of which would soon bankrupt Middle Eastern kleptocrats and their terrorist soul-mates--is out of the question. So US policy makers decide American military power is essential to "running things" in Oil Territory, to ensure future oil deliveries to our shores. What their policies ensure is official American support for foreign dictatorships; endless warfare, bloodshed and carnage; rising resentment and deadly hatred for Americans, motivated mostly by US military actions, which reinforce the worst aspects of the bad culture that dominates the Middle East. Meanwhile, our anti-capitalist domestic policies increase our dependence on foreign thugs; which, together with the enormous costs of US attempts to run things in the Middle East and around the world, threatens to impoverish Americans. Our strongest defense against any foreign threat is a decentralized free market economy.
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