There are a lot of people who don’t like to hear what Ron Paul says about America’s foreign policy. He is right though, no matter how big of a pill it is to swallow for some of the gun totin’, flag wavin’, folks on the right. With America’s economic prosperity on the rocks, we really can’t afford to keep tens of thousands of troops and some 300 bases on foreign soil. It simply doesn’t make sound economic sense any more (if it ever did at all). There is absolutely no logical rationale to have such an empirical force abroad with so much want and suffering of American citizens here at home.
Paul is right about something else too. They really don’t “hate us for our freedom,” as George W. was always so fond of saying. They hate us because we are the ancient Rome of the modern world. All around the globe, we impose our troops and our will upon peoples of foreign lands. People who, like us, do not want for a will of their own. Some of who we call terrorists, they call freedom fighters. We live in relatively safe suburban neighborhoods while they live in war zones. They know people who have perished in armed conflicts that we always have a stake in.
Maybe American boots are on the ground in their country; maybe they aren’t. Maybe one side of warring factions is funded by us, or their troops supplied by us. Maybe one side is us, patrolling their neighborhoods. Sometimes we show up to help regimes like Saddam in Iraq when he was squared off with Iran, or the Taliban in Afghanistan when they were fighting with the Russians. Other times, we show up later to topple those very same regimes. For us, it is always bout doing the right thing at the right time. For them, for the peoples of the foreign lands we dabble in, there is only a constant state of war and strife and turmoil for their families to live in…and die in. In time, they cease to care which side we are on in a given moment. They know only that always there is war where they live, and always, somehow, we are involved in it.
What Ron Paul said recently got me to thinking. What if the Chinese really did have military bases in the United States? What if Chinese troops occupied our land and patrolled our streets? Would it matter if they called it a “peace keeping mission” or were trying to “win our hearts and minds” by having their armed soldiers give candy to our children?
I remember in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina traveling through the Gulf as part of the recovery effort. Perhaps nothing seemed more strange, or more surreal, than being stopped at checkpoints by armed American soldiers then. Their mere presence is intimidating and an aggression of sorts against the psyche of a free people. And those were American troops on American soil! What if they weren’t? What if they wore another nation’s flag upon their patches as they stared you down with suspicion, one hand always on their automatic rifle?
Who would you ultimately seek to rebel against? Where would you lash out? I agree with Ron Paul. They don’t hate us for freedom. They never have. It is a ludicrous statement if you think about it very long at all. It doesn’t even begin to explain anything or make the least bit of sense. What does make sense however, is what Ron Paul has alluded to. They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us because we threaten their freedom. Three hundred military installations in almost as many countries is not a strategy for national defense. It is an empire. It’s time to bring all of our young people home and focus on making America great again.