Excellent post!
I have this particular extremely liberal pal, calls himself libertarian, that objects to our military being used solely to enforce foreign policy. He says it should only be used to defend our borders. Dangerous isolationism that allows tyrants worldwide to interfere with commerce says I, and waiting for the enemy to make the first move is not the best defense, especially with the problems that come with international commerce interrupted to the point where much needed resources are limited by what becomes a blockade.
Like this author’s, this is a very short-sighted view.
"American interests" are too often those of global corporatists who don't pay taxes to maintain the safety of their financial empires, enforcement of contracts, and safe transit of goods. The Pax-Americana is an operating subsidy to out-sourcing.
Like this author’s, this is a very short-sighted view.
I could say the same about the extreme contrary. The American vision of human rights to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" everywhere is not the same as growing a military police State for the purpose of enforcing them. As we have seen, the power to enforce a right is the power to violate it. Here the Founders were wise in specifically limiting powers and entrusting the people as law-enforcement. What used to be a policy of empowering the people of foreign lands to throw off their oppressors has become a tactic of using a very expensive military to do it for them. I suspect this distinction is the fulcrum of this conundrum.
It was the "professionalization" of law enforcement in pursuit of an ephemeral "equal protection" that has been a major part of our undoing, in pursuit of distinctions in law too complex to enforce among the myriad variations found in real life. No wonder we're demanding cameras everywhere, but with that much "oversight" is anyone feeling free? From an education system incapable of producing informed jurors and voters has come a professional enforcement behemoth threatening every right itself becoming more ignorant and self-interested by the decade, crushing us under the weight of unionized retirement benefits.
So I'm no so sanguine about protecting the planet. I'm more interested in maintaining the strength and demonstrated will to threaten mortal destruction of any adversary while arming the natives to kill their own damned bad guys. As we have seen, nuclear weapons have produced what I call "the impotence of power," a force so great we dare not use it. It is that restraint as goaded by our enemies within which has emboldened our enemies without and forced us to build a technical architecture capable of enslaving the whole world, an irony that escapes no one. Now that we are nearly done constructing that net with debt, our masters are ready, willing, and able to impoverish us with a tweak of interest rates, free capital so far having built the means to replace labor worldwide. It's a hell of a fix.
Yet the only thing that emplaces said fix is the enforcers' loyalty to their paycheck. As the family disintegrates, that demand is decoupled. Therewith the globalists may have cut their own throats. Sadly, at the rate things are degenerating, perhaps we'll soon see.