As much as I like Ron Paul, the two of us are never more out of step than when he tries to justify his foreign policy approach. I think he damaged himself significantly on this count in last night’s debate.
Paul’s position is essentially that the United States has enemies in the Middle East because we meddle. If we’d stop bombing and invading and just mind our own business, then we wouldn’t have an Islamist terror problem anymore. I find this quite naive, mostly because I think it pretends to know too much about what our respective goals and objectives are. The assumption is that everyone in the world is wired that way—or if there are dissenters, there aren’t enough to matter—and that if we’ll all just leave each other alone, we’ll have trade agreements and the honey will flow and so forth.
The problem is that far too many people have a fire in the belly that explicitly tells them not to leave folks alone. This can be one of the oldest sentiments there is: “I’m going to take that because I want it and I don’t believe you can stop me.” Perhaps more germanely, it can be a drive to implement sharia law (and you know, I can’t think about sharia at all without chuckling at the memory of all those shrieking “theocracy” during the Bush administration). I think there are dangerous levels of both out there, and I think it takes the biggest kid on the block imposing his will to keep them in check.
Consequently I reject utterly any notion of parity as a guiding principle in foreign policy. Mutually beneficial is best, of course, and that’s possible with many nations. (Gee, that list of “many nations” tends to include those with similar values to ours. Coincidence? Ha!) But if impossible, then American interests prevail. And when I consider that America imposing its will tends to have as its goal the lack of someone inferior imposing his will, I prefer it to any plausible alternative. We’re not going to have a globe of equals. We’re going to have the biggest kid calling a lot of the shots, and so I want to be the biggest kid.
Ugly American? All right. If you insist.
There is certainly still plenty of discussion for reasonable people. Whence nation-building? We can talk about whether the United States should “(embark) on decades-long, trillion-dollar campaigns to make them love us” or “quick ten-million-dollar lessons in why they should fear us,” as John Derbyshire so eloquently expressed. I definitely tend toward the second position. Radical Islamists, or two-bit dictators, or whoever can hate America all they want, and as long as that hatred also contains a goodly dose of fear, it doesn’t bother me a whit.
No greater friend; no worse enemy.
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