Let's analyze this:
Yes, arming Ukraine has risks, but Putin won't stop. Can't fret too long about side-effects of chemo when 100% sure cancer will kill you!
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) February 4, 2015
The U.S. exceptionalists have been playing this same horror show script for over 100 years. They're going to take the most expensive military machine ever created by mankind an rip out that cancer! (There's always a cancer by the way. Sometimes, like today, they juggle multiple cancers).
Here's the problem.
Every time the U.S. takes its super-duper high-tech military machines to mow down the cancer, they accomplish the equivalent of mowing down a field of dandelions:
Yes, enormous strength blows through. High-fives and patriotic flags are flown. Presidents strut like peacocks in front of big banners that say "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED".
Meanwhile:
The original cancer reproduces in a million different directions. Different adaptations that go by different names and that adhere to different ideologies spring forth.
Why does this keep happening?
Why, after 100+ years of almost non-stop war, has the most expensive and most heavily equipped military not delivered a coup de grace? It can't possibly be a lack of money, or manpower, or believers. It has an abundance of all of that.
It's because you can't cure cancer with cancer.
You can't brighten a dark room with more darkness.
The opposite of every form of tyrannical "cancer" on earth is Liberty. It's not militarism. The last 100 years have more than proved that. Liberty and non-aggression are the only cure.
They're also sorely missing in what used to be the Land of The Free.
Chris Rossini is author of Set Money Free: What Every American Needs To Know About The Federal Reserve. Follow @chrisrossini on Twitter.
This is true thinking, but senseless foreign policy advice relevant to no one. The author has incorrectly presumed that states exist to serve their subjects. They don't. They can't. They don't work that way. "Libertarian foreign policy" is a contradiction in terms.
ReplyDeleteForeign policy is a purely statist subject matter. It's soley about how statists best grapple with other statists as part of a zero-sum game over territory and subjects. Non-aggression is a losing strategy for a violent power struggle.
It's like advising a mafia man that he should be peaceful. That's dumb advise. The mafia fundamentally doesn't work that way. A mafia man attempting it would be promptly outcompeted by another mafia man who gets it.
Foreign conflicts are how states gain and maintain their power and relevance at home and abroad. So if you are looking to offer statists advise relevant or useful to the position they find themselves in it would be to inflame and spread foreign conflict, as indeed they now do. The only other kind of advise one can rationally give a statist would be to quit being a statist.