Today AP has a story “Top Trump Aides Clashing over Direction of US Foreign Policy”. This exemplifies the typical confusion over government decisions. If our government had been limited in nature and remained that way with a known and fixed aim of defending property rights, such confusion would today be greatly reduced. If over the course of the past 250 years, our government had developed an understanding of how to achieve such an aim and what proper principles to rest upon as it faced changing realities, confusion today would be greatly reduced. The government would know how to treat Israel, Syria, Russia and so on properly, even as foreign situations changed, even as threats changed, and even as economies changed.
Non-intervention presumably would be one of those principles. Avoiding entangling alliances would be another. While no principle automatically reveals the right action, these are like a magnet pointing in a given fixed and known direction. The alternative, which is intervention, is a spectrum of infinite possibilities. That leads to doubt, clashes of opinion, confusion of aims and confusion of methods. After decisions are made, a new set of open-ended possibilities always emerges. The wielders of power benefit from this never-ending process in many ways. Certain business interests benefit. The media benefits by having a constant supply of new and suspenseful stories and characters to follow, very much in the entertainment vein.
Isn’t the entertainment industry providing enough dramatic conflict? Aren’t imagined stories enough? Aren’t vicarious thrills enough? Do we really need to have a government constantly looking for trouble and finding it? Do we really need to be at war constantly? Can’t we be satisfied with the challenges of everyday life? Must we support the evil and deadly games of our government? Our wars are versions of gladiator combats on a level far greater than the Roman. We even provoke combatants in the form of terrorists. Do we think that life is about war? Are we confused about the nature of life?
8:23 am on August 8, 2017
