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Zonie63 -> RE: What would the world be like without U.S. interventionism? (5/13/2014 9:51:41 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: vincentML
What would the world be like without U.S. interventionism?
This question was raised in a documentary I viewed recently.
Laying aside our 19th Century and early 20th Century adventures in imperialism, our late 20th Century interventions have been of two sorts: humanitarian intervention (Kosovo where we acted and Rwanda where we did not) and protective intervention (Kuwait, southern Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, etc.) Intervention has cost us lives and treasure. We have military troops stationed throughout Europe and in some Middle East nations. Also in Japan, Korea, and in the straits of Taiwan. We safeguard the sea routes to transport oil from the Middle East to Japan, China, and Europe. (The U.S. is actually a minor consumer of Middle Eastern oil.)
We are currently the world’s only super power. Many people in the world despise us for being bullies while others seek our protection. And mostly those nations under U.S. protection spend very little of their GDP on military defense. The American military budget is twice the amount of the next three or four military forces combined.
What would the world be like if one day we elected a president and congress who brought home all our troops and decided to spend a portion of our defense budget on badly needed infrastructure improvement? Would the nations of the world sort out their interests peacefully? Do we have a responsibility to maintain Pax Americana on a worldwide basis? Do we have a greater, overriding responsibility to reducing our national debt and providing a social safety net for our own people?
Your thoughts????
I do think it's time that we enter a new era in foreign policy. I don't think that we need to totally "isolationist," as many interventionists seem to fear. I think that we could take on a more neutral position, while sticking more to the basics of protecting our own physical territory and freedom of the seas - which was an important aspect of our foreign policy from the very beginning.
We may have to go along with a regional power system, where the major powers of the world would hold hegemony over their own region - or at least be involved in sharing that hegemony with other major powers. If the goal is stability and order, then we'll have to play ball with those powers who have the strength and wherewithal to enforce that stability and order. It really depends on what our goals are at this point. What do we want our role to be in this world? What do we hope to achieve, and what do we hope to gain? Are we simply doing it out of selfless devotion to freedom, justice, and democracy? Or do we do what we need to do for our practical national interests? And if so, are we really being "practical"?
Another aspect of this is how we view the rest of the world. Americans tend to look at other places in the world and see disorder, violence, tyranny, terrorism, poverty, famine, endless tragedy and atrocity - that there's just so much horror and evil and the world is such a dangerous place that we need protection. And if we didn't have a strong military presence around the world, the argument goes that it would be even worse, that we'd be yielding control to all these "evil people" who do all these evil things. Some see us on the side of "good," so it's our job to stop "evil." But foreign policy is too complex to reduce it to the level of a comic book or simplistic notions of "good vs. evil."
I think that if we tried to look at the world on a more realistic and rational level, we could probably come up with a more realistic and practical foreign policy. I think some well-meaning people may have thought that the UN and an entire global system they hoped for would bring about peace and stability through fair negotiation and compromise. We're committed to the independence of sovereign nations, democracy, free/open markets - where everyone is free, prosperous, healthy, and happy - and the whole world is like the "United States of Earth." Unfortunately, it hasn't really turned out that way, and I'm not sure if that means we should just give up and go back to the old ways, or if we should try to think of something else.
Maybe we could start building up our space fleet.
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