Representative Ron Paul, whose run for president in 2008 essentially sparked the current "get-back-to-the-constitution" movement, wrote a piece in 2007, "The Original American Foreign Policy" which I believe succintly explains what our nation's foreign policy ought to be. He writes:
"I believe our founding fathers had it right when they argued for peace and commerce between nations, and against entangling political and military alliances. In other words, noninterventionism."
This view was long ago stigmatized for many by the application of the word "isolationism." However, isolating America is not what the congressman is suggesting here:
"Nonintervention simply means America does not interfere militarily, financially, or covertly in the internal affairs of other nations."
He quotes Thomas Jefferson from his 1801 inaugural address as summing up this noninterventionist foreign policy position as follows:
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none."
"Washington similarly urged that we must, 'Act for ourselves and not for others,' by forming an 'American character wholly free of foreign attachments,'" says Paul.
He concludes thus:
"It is time for Americans to rethink the interventionist foreign policy that is accepted without question in Washington. It is time to understand the obvious harm that results from our being dragged time and time again into intractable and endless Middle East conflicts, whether in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine. It is definitely time to ask ourselves whether further American lives and tax dollars should be lost trying to remake the Middle East in our image."
John Quincy Adams, who served as U. S. Secretary of State, delivered a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on July 4, 1821 in which he described America's place in the world:
"And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart."
Adams then described the foreign policy of the Republic:
"Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not 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.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....
[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."
In an article, "A Tea Party Foreign Policy," Rep. Paul tries to show that the foreign policy position of our founding fathers accords with the values of the "Tea Party" movement:
"As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.
Our foreign policy is based on an illusion: that we are actually paying for it. What we are doing is borrowing and printing money to maintain our presence overseas. Americans are seeing the cost of this irresponsible approach as their own communities crumble and our economic decline continues."
Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are the main representatives of antiwar conservatism in this era. "What? Antiwar Conservatism?" you say---yet there is a long tradition of conservatives who said no to war....it's just lost to our normal understanding of history.
In Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism, a book by Bill Kaufman, we get some enlightenment on this subject. There is this excellent review of this book by Thomas Woods--- "Come Home, Conservatives!—to the Antiwar Conservative Movement". I own Kaufman's book, and he is truly a good writer, by the way.
One of those profiled in the book is Ohio Senator Robert Taft, who was a powerful member of the Republican party known in his day as "Mr. Republican." He declared on the Senate floor in 1951 that “the principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people. … Its purpose is not to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries, according to their customs, and to the best of their abilities.” According to Taft, the second goal of American foreign policy was peace.
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