Pat, a staunch conservative, has some tough words for Bush here:
Pat Buchanan on isolationism and protectionism
Isolationist thought appeals to me. There are many times I think about how I would like to just shut down the rest of the world and go on with life in America.
Unfortunately, nothing in politics and war is ever as black and white as we would like.
We made the decision, and rightfully so, to get involved in World War II. And we will never be able to untangle ourselves from the world again.
Now I will say, we probably could change our ways.? Look at Japan. They were once mass murderers and now they are 100% pacifists. However, they are still playing on the world stage.
We Americans are aggressive mother F’ers.? And I suspect that deep down even in the hearts of our most liberal bretheren, we like the fact that you don’t mess with us. The downside to that is that it’s expensive… monetarily and relationally.
On top of all of that, the new world economy requires us to be world players. We would get creamed economically if we closed all interaction with the rest of the world.
Oh… it’s so complicated.
I do wish we had a better Iraq strategy. It’s mired. I don’t think anyone can honestly disagree with that. I’m not saying we should pull up stakes and run, but I would love a dialogue as to what we should be trying. There is none of that going on that I can see. It’s just one side disagreeing with the other side. And no dialogue happens.
That’s a shame.
Comments
2 responses to “Pat Buchanan on isolationism and protectionism”
I’ve often thought that to eliminate the deficit, the US should (now this might be a bit extreme for some folks) quit giving money (of any kind) to foriegn contries for 1 year. This obviously won’t work, we are “globalized” too much. Wikipedia has an entry for Isolationism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolationism), which I found interesting, and began exploring the International Relations Theory links on the page.. but, I digress. Bush is in a difficult position, as you have said in the past, it will be interesting to see what Hamas does. Japan, was invading most of the East during WWII, and the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki brought an end to the war. (It may be debated it was ending already.) The act of bombing Japan undoubtedly launched the US to the status of a world power, and was the foundation of Japan’s pacifism.
Now, lets take today, or rather just post Sept. 11 2001, Al-Qaeda claims resposibility, and is dug into caves in Afghanistan. If we truely wanted to put an end to terrorism, we would have gone in and detonated an underground atomic device, collapsing the terrain, and been done with it.
Nope, now we have been there for _many_ years, and have every uninformed yahoo like myself putting in their $.02 about the war. Our news media is broadcasting everything to our enemies.. how do we come off looking? We have the ACLU & EFF filing lawsuits due to illegal wiretapping, which should never have even come to light, because we are in the middle of a war. Wouldn’t this activity fall under the definition of Executive Power as defined by the Constitution? The leak/informant should be tried for treason. I’m all for my right to privacy, and a due’s paying member of the EFF, but if another event like 9/11 happens, I’ll be one of the first people up in arms asking why the hell the govt didn’t know about it.. and stop it. Sad, we don’t live in an altruistic world..
Please excuse my spelling & grammer.. fat fingers & writing way too much perl code is taking its toll.