by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
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:
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“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 points. First, we should engage in mutually beneficial peaceful commerce with the rest of the world, but forcing nothing, as Washington was careful to add. Second, while trading with them, we should avoid entanglements in the political affairs of other countries and in their quarrels with other nations. Finally, we should always remain strong enough to defend ourselves from attack.
This system was endorsed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the other Founders. That was no accident. Nonintervention was the natural counterpart to the form of government, the Republic, which they had instituted. The monarchies of Europe were all massive war machines, systematically exploiting the people to finance the never-ending conflicts and to support the military and civilian bureaucracy that those conflicts necessitated. The old monarchies were dedicated to the pomp and glory and power of the state. America would be different: Novus Ordo Seclorum, as you will find still on the back of dollar bills, the new order of the ages.
Here, the rights of the people, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, of all things the pursuit of happiness, that was our mainstay. Government power was to be strictly limited, mainly exercised by the localities and the states. Hence the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which still reads, for all the good it does us, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ Taxes would be low, and the public debt would soon be liquidated, ensuring that the citizens, citizens not subjects, would not be routinely plundered as was the European and monarchial way.
In order to forestall high taxes, debt, and the centralization of power, there was a crucial precondition, however; we had to steer clear of war. Here is the considered opinion of James Madison: ‘Of all the enemies of true 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, debts, and taxes are the known instrument for bringing the many into the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive, that is the President and his minions, is extended. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’
