The Revolution by Ron Paul Read Free Book Online

that isn’t just because foreign meddling makes us more enemies, though that commonsensical point is certainly correct. Beyond even that, we waste a staggering amount of manpower, hardware, and wealth on a bloated overseas presence that would be better devoted to protecting the United States itself. Our forces are stretched much too thin, what with our 700 bases around the world and all the nation-building work that conservatives not so long ago criticized Bill Clinton for imposing on our military.
    We have had troops in Korea for over five and a half decades. We have had troops in Europe and Japan for about as long. How many years is enough? An American presence in these places was supposed to be temporary, persisting only during the military emergencies that were cited as justification for bringing them there. Milton Friedman was right: there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.
    With a $9 trillion debt, perhaps $50 trillion in entitlement liabilities, and the dollar in free fall, how much longer can we afford this unnecessary and counterproductive extravagance?
    While our government engages in deficit spending to fund its military exploits overseas, detracting from our own productivity, countries like China are filling the void by expanding their trade opportunities. I have never understood this talk of our military presence as a “strategic reserve of Western civilization.” Instead, the best indication of our civilization has been our prestige in international trade. We should let the best measure of our American greatness come from free and peaceful trade with other nations, not from displays of our military might.
    Now it would be a great step forward if we could even debate the foreign policy we have now, a policy that (with a few minor differences) is shared by the establishment of both major parties. One writer correctly labels it “the debate we never have.” Although many Americans oppose the continued expansion of Big Government abroad, nonintervention is never presented to them as an option. The so-called debates between pundits they see on television or read in the newspaper carefully limit the range of debate to the point of insignificance. The debate is always framed in terms of which kind of interventionist strategy our government should pursue. The possibility that we should avoid bleeding ourselves dry in endless foreign meddling is not raised. For heaven’s sake, what kind of debate is it in which all sides agree that America needs troops in 130 countries?
    That may have been the kind of debate that the old
Pravda
once allowed, but where is the robust exchange of ideas that we should expect in a free society?
    If we ever have such a debate, some Americans may conclude that the increased risk of terrorism is a price they are willing to pay in order to continue our government’s interventionist foreign policy. Others will realize that foreign interventionism is bankrupting us and making us less secure. However it came out, at least we would have had the debate. At the end of such a debate, Michael Scheuer concludes, Americans “may decide that the foreign policy status quo that exists at the moment is what they want. But if they do, they will at least go into it with their eyes open, and know that they are in for an extended period of war, a tremendously bloody and costly war.”
    Meanwhile, our lack of debate has had terrible consequences for our republic. James Bamford observes that the leadership of al Qaeda hoped to lure us into a “desert Vietnam,” an enormously expensive war that would deplete our resources and help their own recruitment by stirring up the locals against us. And that is just what happened. The war’s ultimate cost is being estimated in the trillions. The dollar is collapsing. And more terrorists are being created. According to a study by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, the vast bulk of the foreign fighters