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.
8:51 am on October 17, 2019
Email Michael S. Rozeff
