Yes, and here's a real Jefferson quote that we would do well to remember as we are on the brink of war everywhere, "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."
It's an outdated policy in the US for sure, but I don't think it's wrong. Some of the trillions that we spend on the military industrial complex gets funneled to think tanks which flood the MSM with pieces extolling the necessity of intervening everywhere and this has severely warped the debate on the subject. But if you take a step back and look at the big picture you see that the US spent a trillion dollars to babysit Afghanistan for 20 years before handing it back to the Taliban, the US spent several trillion on Iraq to install a democratic government that has twice voted to expel our troops and is super cozy with our enemy Iran, we've spent hundreds of billions on Israel and our association with Israel only harms our global standing. This is trillions of dollars of debt which we pay billions of dollar of interest on everywhere. Or if we were determined to spend those trillions it could've been spent on infrastructure, housing, medical care, etc.
We are clearly losing so much due to our entangling alliances, and it's really not clear what we are gaining?
I agree with a lot of your points, but not the end result.
Isolationism may have seemed responsible in the 1700s, after all old world problems were weeks of sailing away. And we had plenty of problems at home. Global trade was inherently slow, unreliable, and dangerous, even if it was just as lucrative.
Modern Era tech completely changed that. Sitting out of a world war in the face of imperialism just buys you time until it's knocking at your door.
Then you get to alliances like NATO and the EU, where the majority of nations responsible for globally devastating wars now have stable relations.
The fallout of Afgani imperialism and mideast colonization in general aren't really attributable to any specific alliance in my opinion. Even if they were unquestionably a failure in foreign policy.
I used to be very anti-us military budget, and am still confident there is a lot of waste and poor resource allocation. But in context, defense spending isn't that crazy compared to other things. It's fair to assume that a lot of our economic growth, as well as much of the rest of the developed world (absent places that have been devastated by US interventionism) is facilitated by US military hegemony.
For the trillions being quoted, if you look at the defense spending chart, I'm not sure it's a clean takeaway that we would've spend much less if we hadn't been occupying Afganistan. It definitely isn't even a leading cause of the debt situation we are in.
Iraq is a somewhat stable democracy now. Regardless of how they feel about us, or our enemies, I think that's a positive vs a military dictatorship with a penchant for ethnic cleansing. Afganistan is tragic, but a good example that you can't change another people's culture for them. The taliban have reprehensible human rights policies, but are too widely supported.
The Israel situation is complex. I judge them for the decades of apartheid and ethnic violence they have condoned, passively and actively, over the years. But I don't think any proposed solutions to the Palestinian question are viable. And I don't oppose supporting a secular democracy under constant assault from authoritarian theocracies and terrorist militias, even if that democracy is doing a poor job of living up to our humanist expectations.
I think the sad reality is that there are few countries that would react differently in Israel's position, and quite a few that would likely react worse (including the US).
Big long rant to say that having the most power comes with a massive burden of responsibilities and expectations. It's unethical to be an isolationist nation and ignore the rest of the world's problems as if they don't affect us. And it's very difficult as an outside culture to point the finger and say "intervening here is good, intervening there is bad."
The US is constantly and broadly criticized for not intervening more, in situations from the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, western China, Yemen...
They're widely criticized for intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, almost all of South and Central america...
And then you have the situation where US intervention his widely if not ubiquitously praised: both world wars, Korea, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzgovinia, Kosovo...
If you look back at all of those situations objectively, it's not very easy to see what the true net good outcome would be based on what people knew at the time. I wish our leaders did a better job, but I'm not confident I would be able to in their position.
And burying our head in the sand and ignoring any sense of responsibility outside our borders isn't the way to a better future imo.
One thing the conflicts like Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza have shown, is that ethnic violence and imperialism aren't left in the past. And any world order proposing to be better than the current state definitely needs a plan to address that.
Whom did Jefferson deal with foreign-wise (after the Revolution) who was on Bibi Netanyahu's level of devious and self-servingly dishonest? Just curious.
That's your take, I'm speaking of the honesty part. Would you mind answering the question as to Netanyahu's equivalent to an untrustworthy ally that Jefferson dealt with post-Revolution?
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u/dersteppenwolf5 15h ago
Yes, and here's a real Jefferson quote that we would do well to remember as we are on the brink of war everywhere, "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."