President Trump’s Interventionism
When Donald Trump ran for president, he made a number of statements that suggested he wanted to curtail our neocon interventionist policy. But since his election, he has continued to send military aid to the Middle East and to Ukraine, He threatened to drop a “bunker buster” bomb on Iran and called for the citizens of Teheran to evacuate their city. He has also called for the residents of Gaza to move elsewhere. Regardless of your view of these conflicts, one fact is indisputable. President Trump’s actions violate our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy. Under that policy, America was to remain neutral in all conflicts, except for direct threats to our country. The great historian Ralph Raico explained our traditional foreign policy with unmatched clarity and eloquence in a speech, “The Case for an America First Foreign Policy,” that he delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation at their conference in Virginia in June 2007. Rather than continue in my own words, here is a substantial part of that speech:
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. . .My view is that our cause should be anchored in the traditional American policy that served us so well in the first 100 years of our life as a nation, a policy that I will be calling America First. The record is laid out in a schoolbook by the great historian Charles Beard, published in 1940, A Foreign Policy for America. Charles Beard was a professor at Columbia and president of the American Historical Association, considered the dean of American Historians until he concluded and documented that Franklin Roosevelt was not really all that sincere when he told the American people, before Pearl Harbor, that he was working night and day to keep us out of war, whereupon Beard was suddenly demonized by the profession and dismissed as a hopeless nutcase.
This was Beard’s thesis in that small book: In our dealings abroad we should basically follow the guidelines laid out by George Washington in his farewell address to the American people. The great rule of conduct in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, we should have with them as little political connection as possible. This statement by Washington, which we may hear maybe once or twice during this seminar, involves three basic point
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
