Just Say No
President Obama has already started the heavy lifting of a U.S. withdrawal from that tormented region with the gradual drawdown of forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Wall Street Journal editorials bemoaning our diminishing influence never mention how long our military would have to stay there to maintain “order” (what order?) and protect our supposed interests (oil and Israel). However, sixty-eight years after World War II, we still have troops and bases in Europe and Japan, and sixty years after the Korean War we still have troops and bases in South Korea. Our withdrawal will not make the Middle East any less tormented, but ultimately, neither did our involvement―it has been tormented for centuries and will continue to be so. Withdrawal is recognition that sharing in the torment runs contrary to U.S. national interests. Here Obama has received an incalculable benefit from the fracking boom. Yes, there are environmental problems with fracking, but we still have not worked out all the problems with the internal combustion engine or many other beneficial technologies―their benefits outweigh their costs. Fracking makes us less dependent on Middle Eastern oil and less susceptible to petro-blackmail, and a world war scale conflagration presents its own problems, including environmental ones.
The Founding Fathers on Non-Interventionism
George Washington: "The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to domestic nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities."
John Quincy Adams: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers. But she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Washington also said: "Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."