What allowed Japan and Nazi Germany to rise to power was the sort of stupid, academic-pollyanna view of the world arising after WWI. The Treaty of Versailles and the ruinous war reparations imposed on Germany brought about a person like Hitler, and, not to put too fine a point on it, also helped bring about the Great Depression. Post-WWI was gun control on a global scale, and Chicago shows how well that works on a city-wide scale. It doesn’t. Never has, never will.
I know quite well what Washington meant, and he meant it in terms of the sort of stupidity that got us into WWI. We should not have meddled in a war between a bunch of inbred cousin-humping monarchies in Europe. If Germany had actually induced Mexico to make a grab for the southwest again, then we would have had actual cause to get involved - to take over Mexico. But to get in the midst of the war between cousin-humpers? No. That’s exactly what Washington warned against: monarchies and cousin-humpers in Europe using the US to their own ends, for their own purposes, at our expense.
WWII happened as a result of the stupidity that arose after WWI, in particular, the “League of Nations” and all the idiotic academics that fawned over it... much as they do today over the UN.
I’ll repeat again, and this time I’ll type very slowly so you can understand it:
We’re broke.
We’re out of money. Even the idiots at the CBO have finally admitted this and are sounding the alarm. The Fed and IMF are awakening to the fact as well, and these are the clowns who helped bankrupt us. As a result of being broke, even if we elected a solid panel of war-mongering neo-cons to office, our actual financial ability to sustain the expenditures necessary for foreign adventures is now severely limited. Rand Paul and others like him realize this.
As an example, we’re pissing 10’s of billions down the rat-hole of the NSA and other snoopy agencies per year, raping the Constitution in the process, and yet none of these clowns could see the Boston Marathon bombings before they happened, despite the Russians handing the bombers to us on a silver platter. The NSA can’t point to a single terrorist plot against the US that they’ve foiled.
OK, so neo-cons warhawks like you might claim “well, the NSA was developed to spy on the Russians/USSR in the Cold War... they haven’t adapted yet to the new world threats.”
Very well then, why did the Russian incursions into Crimea and Ukraine come as a surprise to all in DC? The NSA should have seen that coming weeks ahead of time. The level of military planning and force organization necessary would have been available on tactical comm channels for weeks of moving men and material around to make those moves. Instead, we have all manner of clowns in Congress and the White House making prognostications that Russian won’t make the move, they’d be “insane” to make such a move... and the Russians don’t look so insane right now.
We’re now going to give up all the gains we made in Iraq and Afghanistan. All that money, all those lives, will have been for basically no net gain. Yes, we killed a lot of terrorists, but net:net, we’ve changed nothing geopolitically. The breeding ground for terrorism is growing more terrorists all the time, and the Muslim world thinks that we’re weak now.
We should go into wars with one objective: To win. Winning means that the enemy is defeated, crushed and has no more appetite for making hostile moves against us. That means killing lots of people - including civilians. Our political leadership no longer has the spine or resolve to do these things. In WWII, we killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with dry eyes and a clear purpose - of winning the war as fast as possible.
Winning in Iraq or Afghanistan would have required real slaughter - on a scale so large that Muslims the world over (1 billion and counting higher) look at the result and say “Hmmm. Well, we’d better not piss off those guys again. The Great Satan wears big boots and when he kicks ass, your ass stays kicked.” No, instead, we got into all manner of domestic squabbling about the scope of war, blah, blah, blah. We didn’t want to win - from the get-go, on both sides of the aisle. Bush/Cheney were talking about being seen as “liberators” and so on. Screw that. We weren’t seen as liberators when we marched into any other country after a war. The South didn’t see Grant or Sherman as “liberators” - but they sure as hell understood that those men meant business when they said “X is going to happen.”
If we’re not going to get into wars to win them, then it is best we stick to our knitting, maintain a strong defensive posture (like the Swiss, for example) and let the rest of the world see how it works without us. Sooner or later, they’ll decide that the UN is useless and the US comes back on the stage, or they’ll go back to killing each other en masse, in which case that leaves more resources for us. Either way, we win.
“We’re broke.”
I have no problem raising taxes IF it is to STRICTLY pay for national defense. Of course, I would not agree to this IF the congress were to use it as a way to grow government outside of DoD.....and DoD needs close scrutiny that they are not wasting money on bureaucracy and bogus contracts. The money should go for personnel, materiel, etc. Stuff needed to actually train for and prosecute a war.
“If we’re not going to get into wars to win them, then....”
To that point I agree. IF a conflict is not worth total force...it probably is not worth pursuing. However, I also know there is the appropriate concept of proportionate response.
“....it is best we stick to our knitting, maintain a strong defensive posture (like the Swiss, for example) and let the rest of the world see how it works without us. Sooner or later, they’ll decide that the UN is useless and the US comes back on the stage, or they’ll go back to killing each other en masse, in which case that leaves more resources for us. Either way, we win.”
At this point you devolve into isolationist nonsense again with the wrong/naive conclusions.
BTW - I am NOT a NEOCON. I have mixed feelings about Iraq and Afghanistan. My main problem with them being that we allowed places we conquered (we didn’t liberate anything) set up Islamic states. That was an epic mistake. IF we are going to spread any “American” value...then the first one should be freedom of religion.