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@Paul Fan:

I am not opposed to waging war. I would just prefer that we do it in a constitutional manner. For example, prior to one American soldier setting foot in a foreign country we have the U.S. Congress actually declare the war…as outlined in the constitution.

When has this ever been the case? It’s been an American tradition since the beginning to engage in small wars, undeclared by Congress.

Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad with the army and navy adding a few other small-scale engagements of their own.

The belief that we were ever an isolationist/non-interventionist nation is a myth. The belief that it is our military interventionism abroad that is a source of hatred and “blowback” is misguided. We would be far less safe, and the world far more dangerous, if America did not exercise its influence and flex its military muscle, where appropriate. What Paulistinians advocate is to do nothing until the moment before a trigger is pulled. It’s like the difference between preventive medicine and treatment.

Extrapolated from one of my brilliant posts:

If Ron Paul thinks American interventionism is not doing more good than harm on behalf of the world (and in particular, on behalf of America) then I suggest he drop Imperial Hubris for a moment, and read the following books:

Imperial Grunts and Hog Pilots and Blue Water Grunts, by Robert Kaplan.

Robert Kaplan has been embedding himself with small deployments, throughout the world. And he will stick with a unit for weeks- not just a day- to get to know the soldiers and to earn their trust. What our soldiers are doing in foreign lands benefits America and benefits humanity, around the world.

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Robert Kaplan says,

people have this image of the U.S. military going all over the world as a busybody, propping up dictatorships. It’s so false. In fact, the only regimes we prop up through training missions are of certified democracies, certified by Congress, which we have not imposed on them, that they’ve evolved organically on their own as democracies.

The Savage Wars of Peace, by Max Boot:

Far from being isolationist before World War II and the formation of NATO, America from the very beginning of the Republic intervened in a nearly continual series of civil wars, coups, and hostage rescues. Starting with attacks on the Barbary Coast pirates between 1801 and 1805, the nation has always interfered in other nations’ business far from home.

Two generations of college students have been taught that all such “adventurism” is nothing but imperialism and running-dog capitalism–and Boot does not deny that states naturally send in their forces out of national interest rather than mere idealism. But he shows that the majority of the time the Marines intervened to stop the slaughter of civilians, to retaliate against the killing of Americans and destruction of their property, and to prevent chaos from spreading beyond a country’s borders. While such incursions often served the local property-owning elites and corrupt grandees, such interventionists as Thomas Jefferson, Chester A. Arthur, and Teddy Roosevelt assumed that order and stable governments were usually preferable to mass uprisings, constant revolution, and mob rule.

Dangerous Nation, by Robert Kagan:

Americans, in fact, have always defined their interests broadly to include the defense and promotion of the “universal” principles of liberalism and democracy enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” Benjamin Franklin declared at the time of the American revolution, and as William Appleman Williams once commented, Americans believe their nation “has meaning . . . only as it realizes natural right and reason throughout the universe”.

This is the real “traditional approach”: the conviction that American power and influence can and should serve the interests of humanity. It is what makes the US, in Bill Clinton’s words, the “indispensable nation”, or as Dean Acheson colourfully put it six decades ago, “the locomotive at the head of mankind”. Americans do pursue their selfish interests and ambitions, sometimes brutally, as other nations have throughout history. Nor are they innocent of hypocrisy, masking selfishness behind claims of virtue. But Americans have always had this unique spur to global involvement, an ideological righteousness that inclines them to meddle in the affairs of others, to seek change, to insist on imposing their avowed “universal principles” usually through peaceful pressures but sometimes through war.

This enduring tradition has led Americans into some disasters where they have done more harm than good, and into triumphs where they have done more good than harm. These days, this conviction is strangely called “neo-conservatism”, but there is nothing “neo” and certainly nothing conservative about it. US foreign policy has almost always been a liberal foreign policy. As Mr Will put it, the “messianic impulse” has been “a constant of America’s national character, and a component of American patriotism” from the beginning.

The other constant, however, has been a self-image at odds with this reality. This distorted self-image has its own noble origins, reflecting a perhaps laudable liberal discomfort with power and a sense of guilt at being perceived as a bully, even in a good cause. When things go badly, as in Iraq, the cry goes up in the land for a change. There is a yearning, even among the self-proclaimed realists, for a return to an imagined past innocence, to the mythical “traditional approach”, to a virtuous time that never existed, not even at the glorious birth of the republic.

This is escapism, not realism. True realism would recognise America for what it is, an ambitious, ideological, revolutionary nation with a belief in its own world-transforming powers and a historical record of enough success to sustain that belief.

Coming off of an interview with Robert Kagan, Michael Medved writes,

Ignoring the long record of American involvement in such conflicts in every corner of the globe, those who question our current world-wide role express reverence for a simple-minded (and non existent) tradition of isolationism. They cite George Washington’s words in his celebrated Farewell Address of 1793: “The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible….’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.” Jefferson also warned against “entangling alliances,” at the same time he negotiated a vast expansion of U.S. territory with France, and pursued the daring and difficult Barbary Wars.

Even Pat Buchanan, the three time Presidential candidate most often identified as a contemporary advocate of “isolationism,” rejects the idea that the nation ever cowered behind its Atlantic and Pacific “water walls.” In his provocative and beautifully written book “A Republic, Not an Empire,” (1999), Buchanan argues: “The idea that America was ever an isolationist nation is a myth, a useful myth to be sure, but nonetheless a malevolent myth that approaches the status of a big lie…. What is derided today as isolationism was the foreign policy under which the Republic grew from thirteen states on the Atlantic into a continent-wide nation that dominated the hemisphere and whose power reached to Peking….To call the foreign policy that produced this result “isolationist” is absurd. Americans were willing to go to war with the greatest powers in Europe, but only for American interests. They had no wish to take sides in European wars in which America had no stake.”

To hammer home how wrong Ron Paul is on foreign policy and a romanticized non-existent isolationist/non-interventionist past, Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy Passport Blog writes,

1. Foreign Policy and the Constitution. Paul is what you might call a Constitutional originalist. He divines his governing philosophy from the Constitution and America’s Founders. But his understanding of their vision is profoundly flawed. Paul appears to believe the founders vested absolute authority for foreign-policy making in Congress, not the executive. “Policy is policy,” Paul wrote in 2006, “and it must be made by the legislature and not the executive.” But there’s almost no evidence the founders saw it in such simplistic, absolute terms. Law professor Michael Ramsey, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, recently noted (pdf) this in very eloquent terms in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Reasonable people can agree that Congress has failed its oversight responsibilities with regard to Iraq and the Bush Doctrine. But Paul’s thinking here is simply not supported by the weight of historical evidence.

2. “Noninterventionism.” This is the word Paul uses to describe his foreign policy, and he insists the term also encapsulates the vision of the Founders. While Paul claims “noninterventionism” is not isolationism, it sure sounds like it is. For instance, he even seeks to dismantle the Bretton Woods system of international cooperation born from the ashes of the Second World War (more on that below). Isolationism by any name, friends, is still isolationism. Sure, such sentiments were rampant in 18th and 19th century America and before WWII. The same sentiments are resurfacing today as a backlash against Iraq. Intelligent people can disagree about the Bush Doctrine’s place in history. But let’s not make up facts. The post-9/11 period has been filled with literature by such historians as John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead debunking the notion that the founders were only concerned with domestic security and never saw an ideological component to America’s place in the world.

Hat tip: American Power.

Here is McCain attacking Paul on the isolationist point (yeah, yeah, yeah…he’s a “noninterventionist”, because he wants to still “do trade” with other nations– do read the link, and then tell me if you really see a distinction between the terms):

McCain: I just want to also say that Congressman Paul, I’ve heard him now in many debates talk about bringing our troops home, and about the war in Iraq and how it’s failed.

(Applause)

And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. We allowed…

(Applause)

We allowed …

(Audience booing)

Cooper: Allow him his answer. Allow him his answer, please.

McCain: We allowed — we allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.

Furthermore, we confine our attacks to groups and countries that actually wage war on us such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda.

The Taliban didn’t attack us. The war we are in isn’t just al-Qaeda. It’s a whole Islamic terror network.

The major thing with Ron Paul that I love is that he keeps trying to return to a more traditional approach of operating Government.

It’s seductive, because it is a romanticized belief in a past that never existed. It’s a great gimmick, with obvious appeal. Basically claiming to be channeling the will of the Founding Fathers.

Again, the biggest issue I have with wRong Paul is on foreign policy. His nutty notions are as naive as that of peaceniks.

This is where Ron Paul and his bearers really lose me.

This is the modern Republican Party:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/

This is American Empire. This is offensive war. This is the template upon which the Bush/Cheney regime launched their administration.

Um….no. This is conspiratorial blather, akin to the scares about the North American Union (why do you think so many Ronulans are 9/11 Truthers?). Why am I not surprised you just brought up the Project for a New American Century?
You’ve been hoodwinked.

Oh, Paul Fan would LOVE that book! He should purchase it. Yoo could use the love and support. And he could use the edumcashion.

Mike, to be fair to the kid, I think he got haruumphity and umbragy when you “condescendingly” asked him his age. Sooo….you started it first! 😉