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Posted on 09/13/2001 7:22:49 AM PDT by sendtoscott

EXCERPT FROM "THE FAILURE OF AMERICA'S FOREIGN WARS"

The following is an excerpt from The Failure of
America's Foreign Wars, published by The Future of Freedom Foundation in
1996:

The Case for an America First Foreign Policy
by Ralph Raico

..For most of our history, America First was the foreign policy of the
United States. The record is laid out by the great historian Charles A.
Beard in A Foreign Policy for America, published in 1940. In our dealings
overseas, we followed the guidelines laid down by George Washington in his
Farewell Address to the American people:

"The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is -- in
extending our commercial relations -- to have with them as little political
connection as possible." --George Washington

Significantly, it is these lines that Richard Cobden -- the greatest
libertarian theorist of international relations -- placed as the motto of
his first published work.

George Washington's outlook thus involved three main principles. First, we
would engage in mutually beneficial, peaceful commerce with the rest of the
world, but "forcing nothing," as Washington made a point of adding. Second,
while trading with them, we would avoid entanglements in their political
affairs and their quarrels with other nations. Finally, we would always
remain strong enough to defend ourselves from attack.

That this system was endorsed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and the other Founders as well was no accident. America First was
the natural counterpart to the form of government -- the Republic -- which
they had instituted. The monarchies of the Old World were massive war
machines, exploiting the people to fund their never-ending conflicts and the
military and civilian bureaucracies those conflicts necessitated. Those
nations were dedicated to pomp and glory and the power of the state. America
would be different -- Novus Ordo Seclorum, "The New Order of the Ages," as
it still states on the back of dollar bills. Here the rights of the people
were to be all-important. Government power was strictly limited and mainly
exercise by the localities and the states (hence, the Tenth Amendment). Low
taxes and the anticipated liquidation of the public debt would ensure that
the citizens would not be systematically plundered, as was the was in
Europe.

But, in order to forestall high taxes, debt, and the centralization of
power, we had to steer clear of war. That is why the advice of the Founders
was: if you want to preserve the system we have established, keep out of
wars except when required to defend the United States, and avoid political
entanglements overseas, since these are likely to lead us into war..

.Beginning at the end of the 19th century, however, a great transformation
took place in the official American attitude towards the rest of the world.
The political elite of the country was won over to a policy of "global
responsibility" -- which meant, more and more, intrusion into other nations'
affairs, backed up by the growing American military strength.

The landmarks along this road are the Spanish-American War and the conquest
of the Philippines under William McKinley; Theodore Roosevelt's noisy
promotion of the United States as a world power; and -- most fateful of
all -- Woodrow Wilson's embroiling us in the First World War..

Advocates of globalism prefer to ignore the disastrous outcome of our
intervention in the First World War. Instead, the case they constantly hold
up to us is World War II and the "lessons" supposedly taught by this "last
good war."

The era of the Second World War has been so mythologized by propagandists
that it is easy to lose sight of some fundamental truths. The fact is that,
regardless of how evil Hitler and the Japanese leaders were, the people of
the United States were manipulated and maneuvered into a war which the great
majority of them did not want..

By now the Constitution has become a dead letter on the question of war and
peace. What the Founding Fathers feared -- that the president would be able,
on his own, to ensnare us into war -- had become a reality. A particularly
saddening aspect of this is the eagerness of so-called conservatives to rush
to vindicate the president's alleged right to start wars. Barry Goldwater
spoke up for it at the time of the Vietnam War; Judge Bork has gone on
record to the same effect; and recently Sen. John McCain, of Arizona, a
Republican "expert" on foreign affairs, has stated that, while he advised
against sending troops to Haiti, there was no doubt that the president had
the authority to send American forces anywhere in the world -- including
into battle -- at any time he wished.

Conservatives often speak of restoring the Constitution. A test of their
honestly will be how hard they fight to restore to Congress the sole
authority to engage America in war.

The Cold War created an Imperial Presidency. During those decades, by simple
presidential decree, the United States waged full-scale war, lasting for
years; overthrew foreign governments; arranged political assassinations;
trained and equipped terrorists for action on foreign soil; mined the
harbors of countries with which we were at peace; and performed innumerable
other acts of war..

A globalist policy leads, as William Graham Sumner warned a century ago, to
an abandonment of our traditional republican form of government. It perverts
our constitutional system, concentrating power in the presidency, rather
than Congress, and in Washington, instead of the states and localities..

Among Ralph Raico's recent publications are the introduction to the
50th-anniversary edition of John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth and the essay
on World War I in the second, paperback edition of The Costs of War, edited
by John V. Denson, both available from Laissez Faire Books. This is an
excerpt from his essay "The Case for an America First Foreign Policy," which
appeared in The Failure of America's Foreign Wars, published by The Future
of Freedom Foundation in 1996.

EXCERPT FROM "THE FAILURE OF AMERICA'S FOREIGN WARS"

The following is an excerpt from Richard M. Ebeling's Introduction to The
Failure of
America's Foreign Wars, published by The Future of Freedom Foundation in
1996:

Introduction to The Failure of America's Foreign Wars
by Richard M. Ebeling

..America, too, had its global calling, according to the social engineers.
America should not merely be a "beacon of freedom" that would be, through
its allegiance to its traditional principles of individual liberty and a
free, self-governing society, an example and a model for multitudes of
others in other lands living in tyranny and yearning to breathe free. No,
this older, 19th conception of America's contribution to the betterment of
the world was discarded in the 20th century. According to Woodrow Wilson, it
was to make the world safe for democracy; according to Franklin Roosevelt,
it was to give the world a New Deal; according to every president since
World War II, it was to supply "leadership" and to be a global policeman in
the name of the "free world" against totalitarian tyranny.

The social engineers thrust America in to the global bonfires of the
insanities. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sacrificed on the altar
of two world wars and several regional conflicts in the name of world peace.
Traditional American freedoms were restricted or sometimes lost in the name
of national security. The honest, hard-earned wealth of millions of
Americans was taxed away and consumed in military combat, war preparedness,
and foreign-aid give-aways to socialist and interventionist governments and
to third-world despots willing to declare their loyalty to the West for the
right price.

In the name of "freedom," the U.S. government trained the secret police of
other countries in the fine art of surveillance and interrogation --
techniques that many governments in those countries then used against their
own citizens and in matters having nothing to do with "fighting communism."
The U.S. government overthrew other governments and gave moral sanction to
the assassination of foreign leaders and the execution of the "politically
unreliable." In the name of "free enterprise," the U.S. government
subsidized public works projects, financed nationalized industries in
various parts of the world, and participated in compulsory land
redistributions.

In the eyes of the social engineers, all of these policies were necessary at
the time and essential for the fulfillment of America's active participation
in the world. Peoples in other lands did not realize that their backward
traditions and institutions were breeding grounds for the enemies of global
freedom. They had to be coerced into new ways for their own good and that of
the rest of the world. Foreign governments would not follow American global
leadership and had to be threatened or bribed to do so. Many Americans were
too ignorant to understand that the only way to fight communism was to
foster mild socialism and welfare redistributivism -- and that their incomes
would have to be taxed to pay for these farseeing, progressive policies.

Even now, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, the
American social engineers continue with their calls for American globalism.
Before, America had to be actively involved politically and militarily in
the world because, it was argued, there was no other major power to stand up
to the Soviet threat. Now, when the Soviet Union is gone, it is argued that
America is the only "superpower" left on the face of the earth and that the
world needs the United States to provide political and military leadership
to prevent regional conflicts and global chaos. It seems that no matter how
much the world may change, the social engineers can always unearth new
rationales for their continuing desire to meddle in other people's affairs,
whether at home or abroad.

It is time to commit the social engineer and his meddling to the dustbin of
history. Social engineering at home has long shown its moral and practical
bankruptcy. Woodrow Wilson's New Freedoms, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal,
Harry Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society did not make America a freer country, a more just
society, or a more prosperous nation. Their planning schemes and
interventionist programs politicized American society, diminished the
freedoms of the American people, perpetuated poverty, and created new
political favoritisms.

Nor have America's global meddling and foreign interventionist adventures
made the world free or secure. Woodrow Wilson's intervention in World War I
helped to create the conditions for the old order in Europe to be replaced
with communism in Russia, fascism in Italy, and eventually Hitler and Nazism
in Germany. Franklin Roosevelt's intervention in World War II replaced Nazi
tyranny with Soviet domination and terror in half of Europe; and it
substituted Japanese imperialism in East Asia with the communist conquest of
China as well as Marxist regimes in half of Korea and Vietnam. Having helped
create the conditions for communist victory in those lands, the United
States then found itself fighting two bloody wars in Asia in the post-World
War II era -- against the very tyrannies its earlier intervention had helped
to bring to power. In both the Korean and Vietnam wars, the communists
prevailed against the American social engineers and their sophisticated
"fine-tuning" conceptions of "limited war" and "controlled escalation."

And so far in the new post-Cold War era, the social engineers continue to
try to make the world over in their own image through military intervention
in Panama, the Middle East, Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia. In
Panama, one corrupt regime was merely substituted for another, although one
more to the liking of the people in Washington; in the Middle East, an
undemocratic government was reestablished in Kuwait, and the same tyrant
continued to rule in Baghdad after American airpower successfully killed
thousands of unfortunate Iraqi soldiers and civilians; Somalia has returned
to the same clan conflict that prevailed before U.N. intervention under U.S.
military leadership; in Haiti, a brutal regime has been replaced by another,
headed by a mentally unstable closet Marxist; and in the former Yugoslavia,
the United States and its European allies bomb those they label aggressors
and send tens of thousands of their military forces to Bosnia as
"peacemakers" in a conflict that is grounded in centuries-old animosities
between ethnic and religious groups who possess no refined notion of
individual liberty, private property rights, or the Western idea of the rule
of law..

It is time to change course. It is time to find our way back to the path of
individual liberty, limited government, and nonintervention in both domestic
and foreign affairs. The Future of Freedom Foundation exists to help in this
endeavor to return America back to its original noninterventionist roots..
The essays in this book have been brought together in the hope that they can
be assist in bringing about that freer and better world that can be ours in
the 21st century.

Dr. Ebeling is the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale
College and serves as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of
Freedom Foundation. This excerpt is from his introduction to The Failure of
America's Foreign Wars, published by FFF in 1996.

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