“Insolvent countries don’t get to play world policeman”
I realize that America is over-extended and needs to scale back. My concern is that a Paul admin would mean a total retreat, with resultant chaos nobody could predict.
In the examples I used, America wasn’t playing the role of global supercop. In WW2, America was helping rid the world of a terrible menace, which was in America’s interest as well (imagine if Hitler had developed the bomb before the USA). In 1973, America resupplied Israel with much-needed arms; it wasn’t playing policeman at all. As for Reagan, he didn’t attack the Soviets militarily, but his branding of the USSR as an “evil empire” and his call to Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” were part of an effort to neutralize the biggest threat to the USA at the time. In all these instances, America wasn’t “meddling” unnecessarily. Ron Paul’s doctrine of “let’s mind our own business” sounds sensible at first but might actually be more dangerous and self-defeating (and certainly less noble) than intervening, in some way, when necessary.
Nobody celebrates the leaders who just “minded their own business”. Nobody celebrates reckless interventionists either. But men like Churchill (many of whose colleagues didn’t want war with Hitler) and Reagan are rightly put on pedestals today for standing up to great evils. Nixon too, despite his shortcomings, had the decency not to turn his back on a country many consider an ally, one that grew out of the ashes of a genocide, and allow yet another genocide to take place.
