There was a time when this nation had a rational foreign policy. During the Reagan era the Peace through strength doctrinaire kept America out of war, while defending its interest against Soviet aggression. The result was the collapse of the Soviet Union without a major war. Since then our foreign policy has become deranged.
Starting with the Clinton Administration, the US foreign policy became oriented in the service of Islamic interest. The US/NATO bombed Christian Serb forces in Bosnia to prevent the defeat of Bosnian Muslims and their al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps allies. In 1999 the US/NATO bombed the Serbs again to created an Albanian Muslim Narco-terror state of Kossovo. We did nothing about the slaughter of 2 Million Sudanese Christians and forced Israel to give Southern Lebanon over to Hezbollah. All this, while the very same Islamists we supported were attacking us. The culmination of these attacks was 9/11.
When 9/11 happened, instead of identifying Islamists as our enemy, President Bush praised it as a religion of peace and through the diversity visa program, gave Islamic nations immigrant preferences. We overthrow the Taliban, but replaced it with a Narco-Islamic state that is flooding the world with heroin. In Iraq we decided to overthrow Saddam and yes there was justification for that, but we immediately began building schools and roads, while our soldiers were getting shot. Even worse, we installed a Pro-Iranian Shiite Islamic regime which was ethnically cleansing Christians before the rise of ISIS. The obsession with Islamic democracy and nation building was a geostartegic disaster.
Under the Obama Regime, the foreign policy of this nation became even more deranged. The US/NATO attacked Qaddafi, who after giving up his WMD’s was an ally against Islamists. The result is that the ISIS franchise Ansar al-Sharia now controls the Western 1/3 of Libya and other Islamist Militias are causing havoc. Supporting the Pro-Iranian puppet regime of Malaki resulted in a Sunni backlash to the rise of ISIS. The same insanity applies with the Obama Regime’s support of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. We now treat one of our closet allies Israel as the unwanted step child to appease Islamists and the International left.
In the Ukraine which has been part of Russia’s sphere since the 1600’s, the Obama Regime with the backing of elements of the Republican Party supported the European Union’s alliance with Ukrainian Neo-Nazis to overthrow the legally elected governmnet to seize that nation’s resources and confiscate people’s wealth under the guise of the IMF. The result is Russia pushing back by taking Crimea and supporting Rightwing wing Russian militias in the Eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, we turned our backs on Christian Conservative and Libertarian anti-Regime protests in Venezuela. The very same Republicans who were pounding their chests like baboons over a confrontation with Russia to help out Euro-Socialists and Neo-Nazis, did nothing to assist their ideological brethren in that South American nation. Standing by the Venezuelan people would have been good PR for Republicans and put Obama in a predicament for going on the record in backing a Marxist dictatorship
Our foreign policy has vacillated between appeasement and nation building. We no longer define what our interest are and pick the wrong causes to get involved in,. What is needed is a return to our traditional foreign policy that rejects nation building and appeasement.
Today there is a torrent of redundant evidence for the Macmillan axiom. When British prime minister Harold Macmillan was asked what caused him the most trouble, he supposedly replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” He certainly used the phrase “the opposition of events.” Events, from Ukraine to Syria to Gaza, are forcing something Americans prefer not to think about, foreign policy, into their political calculations.
Having recoiled from the scandal of the Iraq War, which was begun on the basis of bad intelligence and conducted unintelligently, Americans concluded that their nation no longer has much power, defined as the ability to achieve intended effects. The correct conclusion is that America should intend more achievable effects.
Obama has given Americans a foreign policy congruent with their post-recoil preferences: America as spectator. Now, however, their sense of national diminishment, and of an increasingly ominous world, may be making them receptive to a middle course between a foreign policy of flaccidity (Obama) and grandiosity (his predecessor).
If so, a Republican presidential aspirant should articulate what George Washington University’s Henry R. Nau calls, in a book with this title, “conservative internationalism.” This would, he says, include:
the liberal internationalist goal of spreading freedom, but doing so “primarily on the borders of existing freedom, not everywhere in the world at once”;
[….]
In eleven ruinous years, beginning with the invasion of Iraq, Republicans have forfeited their foreign-policy advantage and Obama has revived suspicions that Democrats are uncomfortable with American power. There is running room for a conservative internationalist.
The appeasement of the Obama Regime has resulted in failure and help create the chaos we see in the world. However, the calls from some in the Republican Party for more nation building and permanent war is not the answer either. The GOP needs to ditch the Jacobin concept of endless wars and realize that America can’t save everybody. We need to define our sphere of influence, make sure the governments in that sphere are friendly and base our interest on economic needs. A combination of realism and humility but based on strength is the foreign policy that the Republican Party should embrace.
