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Article published Nov 20, 2007
Renouncing empire
November 20, 2007
Bruce Fein - Nonintervention and global neutrality should be the national security creed of the United States. Every soldier deployed abroad — whether in South Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere — should be returned to deter and defend the United States at home.
Non-intervention and neutrality everywhere coupled with a threat to annihilate any United States attacker would make the country safer, freer and more prosperous. The United States should recognize the obvious. Its contemporary leaders lack the high-mindedness and wisdom necessary to extend democracy and liberty abroad. Their motives are invariably cynical, and their adventurisms create more enemies than they destroy.
Power is insatiable. It feeds on itself to gratify the ambitions of power-hungry rulers. Thus, Julius Caesar boasted: "I came, I saw, I conquered." Every empire in history has sought to extend its territory by military force for the sake of extension. Every empire has also been destroyed by its own hubris. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price along the way in lives lost in foreign follies, escalating taxes and vandalized liberties.
In his Farewell Address, President George Washington warned against "overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." He warned against entangling or permanent alliances. As president, he insisted on strict neutrality between feuding European powers. But his words and actions have been honored more in the breach than in the observance.
President James K. Polk, intoxicated with the idea of "manifest destiny," warred against Mexico in 1846. Then 2nd Lt. Ulysses S. Grant later deplored the conflict as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory."
As the United States grew more powerful, it correspondingly increased its projection of power instead of husbanding and organizing its resources at home to deter and thwart would-be aggressors. The latter is the course George Washington would have followed. The best defense is not a good offense, but a good defense. In his Fifth Annual Address to Congress, he explained that to secure peace, "it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War." Armed neutrality would be both a viable and desirable national security posture.
Washington elaborated in his Farewell Address: "If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving of provocation."
President John F. Kennedy, in his Inaugural, gave lofty expression to the unthinking and ill-conceived conviction that the United States is the global steward of liberty obliged to employ military force wherever it is endangered or crushed: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."
President George W. Bush bettered Kennedy's instruction in his latest State of the Union message. In substance, Mr. Bush asserted that God had appointed the United States as knight-errant to destroy all nondemocratic dispensations in the Milky Way to prevent the nation's crucifixion.
The United States, however, has neither a moral nor legal responsibility for people living under other sovereigns. Who feels guilty about the United States nonintervention policy toward the tens of millions who perished in Josef Stalin's purges, Mao Tse-tung's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's dystopia? The United States, moreover, is no more capable of giving birth to democracies abroad than were the scientists of the Floating Island of Laputa in "Gulliver's Travels" capable of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Just ask the Iraqis and Afghanis. The wise nation knows what it doesn't know.
The global military projection of the United States as imperative to national security has become mainstream gospel. But as Bertrand Russell advised, "In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
At present, the United States possesses the weapons and defense systems to make credible a threat to reduce any aggressor nation into a nuclear grave site. Further, if the United States withdrew its troops from abroad, renounced any territorial or ideological designs on any country, and embraced strict neutrality, other nations would have little or no motivation to attack. In addition, the hundreds of billions in military spending at present squandered in foreign adventures could be redirected into making United States defenses invincible.
Suppose a nonintervention policy eventuated in a planet in which the United States was the only democracy where the rule of law and individual liberty flourished; but, that nonintervention had saved the lives of millions of American soldiers who otherwise would have been vanquished on foreign shores in quixotic endeavors to defeat tyranny. Wouldn't the trade-off have been be justified?
What Voltaire in "Candide" prescribed for individuals has equal application to nations: "Tend your own garden."
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates and chairman of the American Freedom Agenda.
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