It’s not news to readers of LRC that the
Republican Party, until Trump came into the picture, has been strongly
pro-empire and pro-intervention worldwide. The reasons for this are that it
satisfies the interests of money and power and ideology. The Democratic Party
has been and still is also pro-empire and pro-intervention for the same reasons. The Republicrats are politicians
captured by these interests, which control information and policy via the deep
state and which control the parties through campaign contributions, payoffs,
blackmail, information control, ideological dissemination, media, intelligence
agencies, the revolving door, recruiting, in other words, the swamp.
Trump is
attacking this complex of forces. That is why he’s under
constant attack from these Republicrats, the combination of Democrats and
Republicans who share and perpetuate the same policies of empire through one
administration after another.
It is not an unmitigated bad for the
U.S. government to hammer out a position in this world of states in which the
rightful interests of the broad American public are maintained and our country
is defended properly. The country need not be isolationist because peaceful
trade is in our interest.
But
it is bad, terribly bad, when this rightful position is corrupted into empire,
worldwide interventions and an attempt at creating a global system in which the
U.S. government predominates. This attempt at making America the sole
superpower is doomed to fail. It has been proven to be exceedingly bloody,
taking millions of lives. It lines the pockets of narrow interest groups who
benefit from continual warfare and the empire’s extension. Meanwhile, the costs
are incredibly high. The debt of the U.S. government is nearly $23 trillion,
which is $185,000 per taxpayer. This debt excludes other legislated
obligations, which may well come to $200 trillion.
In other words, empire is a policy that’s
breaking America’s back to enrich a relatively few, to enrich the swamp-dwellers
and to delight the globalists who want to see America fail, such as George
Soros.
Now,
the occasion for this brief statement is a report of certain remarks made
by George W. Bush, one of our ex-presidents who is a Republicrat.
Bush,
who is responsible for two terrible and terribly expensive wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, criticized Trump’s withdrawal of a mere 1,000 of troops from Syria
as isolationist. He’s totally wrong. He’s totally in thrall to the idea of
empire and intervention. He still fails to see the downsides. He still fails to
see his own failures and monstrous errors.
He
was at a conference with Bill Clinton beside him, who likewise is a strong
proponent of empire, having extended NATO and bombed in the old Yugoslavia. All
that was needed was Obama to complete the trio of presidents who favor empire.
Well, not quite. We’d need to throw in a few Congresses who have funded these
interventions.
Against
this Trump stands, and not even wholeheartedly but in a piecemeal, inconsistent
and halting fashion, one that we hope nonetheless is stepwise in a single
direction, which is to disengage this country from empire and intervention as a
policy that’s sold as being sound and even said to be right, when it is clearly
unsound and wrong.
Bush
said “We are becoming isolationist and that’s dangerous for the sake of peace.”
Wrong. Taking down empire, disengaging from tar pits and sinkholes, in favor of
proper engagements and relations with other states and peoples is not
isolationist. It’s FOR the sake of peace, not dangerous to it. Bush’s thinking
is addled and so is that of many interventionist Republicrats who tell us that
peace requires continual war. Peace of our people, of Americans, requires
constructive engagements with other peoples according to moral and pragmatic
principles, as much as can be mustered in a world in which there are many
states. Peace for us requires that we have proper defenses and a readiness to
defend ourselves. Peace does not require peace everywhere in the world that’s
insured or brought about by Americans; and it cannot be achieved anyway, if
only because of cost, the resistance of opposing forces, and the inability to
create ideal societies. The aim of peace everywhere in the world is utopian and
unobtainable. We cannot even achieve this in our own country. But this faulty
aim is what is sold to Americans as a goal in order to justify the empire
overseas and to justify powerful governments domestically.
A sounder aim is to shun taking over
the world in one form or another, but instead to accept the presence of many
different countries, states, governing entities, peoples and societies. They
have their problems, we have ours, and one of our problems is that our system
is running amok in the hands of Republicrats with their flawed ideas. A sounder
aim is peace here at home, and this means rejecting government-imposed
collectivist solutions. Communism is widespread in America, but it is far from
peaceful. Every one of our communist institutions relies upon coercion through
laws that Congress imposed on us. We must reject this unrecognized and
applauded communism in all its forms. Otherwise, America will die from the
communist wounds already inflicted on her.
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of
Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free
e-book Essays
on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free
e-book The
U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.
