Ron Paul and Stephen Kinzer: The History of Interventionism

Today on the Ron Paul Channel, Dr. Paul interviews Stephen Kinzer, author of the fascinating new book on the Dulles brothers and their interventionist rampage through the 1950s.

As Kinzer tells Dr. Paul in the interview, the Dulles brothers — John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as CIA Director — never paused for a moment to consider that the operations they were launching would have “huge terrible implications for American security, decades and even generations later.”

From Iran to Iraq to Egypt to Syria to China to Africa to every hot spot we see in the news today, the Dulles brothers, with the blessing of President Eisenhower, inserted their covert and overt fingers. The brothers literally overflowed with their deep faith in American exceptionalism and the need to remake the world in their own image.

Before the John McCain and Lindsey Graham show, before the neocons and their promises of “cakewalks” and overblown hysteria about the “next Hitler” that demanded immediate attention, there were the Dulles brothers setting[amazon asin=0805094970&template=*lrc ad (right)] the stage for the nearly seventy years of US interventionism that followed. Today’s neocons will nary invoke their names — as the brothers’ every operation produced terrible counterproductive “blowback” — but to be sure, in the Dulles brothers we find their direct foreign policy parentage.

The cancer that has ravaged the US foreign policy establishment, producing failure after failure and eating away at our moral authority the earth over, had its origins in the post-World War II notion of interventionism through covert and overt action.

Readers who are not already subscribers to the Ron Paul Channel will find this fascinating interview alone worth the cost of a subscription — where else in the media can you see this perspective? Also, Kinzer’s book, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War is a must-read for anyone interested in the origins of our horrible foreign interventionism.