Reason #2 To Vote For Ron Paul

[FaninAma]

http://www.haciendapub.com/politics9.html

"Perpetual War"............interesting concept. I think we are pretty close to being at that point.

[MR2-Sooner86]

We did it for 50 years after WWII. If we thought the soviets or communism were moving in, we went in. Now we're doing...who knows what we're doing in the Middle East. We scream "human rights!" yet we give trillions to China who killed their own people during a pro-democracy protest and throw their own people into "re-education" camps. We supported a drug dealer until it got exposed in Iran-Contra so we had to turn on him and then invade Panama. Does South Korea pay for our services?

Our foreign policy is such a cluster fornication.

[Curly Bill]

Do we actually have a foreign policy or do we just do what seems halfass right at the time?


...and I mean halfass right according to the politicians, who are hardly ever any degree of right.

[Veritas]

Do we actually have a foreign policy or do we just do what seems like it will return the most votes in the next election?]

FTFY

Also, I balked a bit a the Newsmax sourcing but Faria is legit.

[KantoSooner]

Some books to read and review:

The Permanent War Economy

The Pentagon's New Map

The Mr. X Papers (Foriegn Affairs, circa 1935)

Bitter Fruit

Krushev's Secret Speech to the Politburo (source? I don't got one)

Our diplomacy has been pretty effing good for the vast majority of the history of our country. Starting with Benjy Franklin conning the French into joining our war of independence in exchange for the joy of being our reeeeeeaaaaaalllllly good friends. Even though no one was actually going to learn their language or engage in trade with them or anything, you know, tangible.
We avoided a war with the Russians and played a fantastic game of 'extend your opponent' until they collapsed. We've reintegrated the Chinese into OUR world without a war. and make no mistake: it's our world. The entire panoply of Bretton Woods organizations, from the UN to the IMF to the World Bank and so forth are pretty much all slanted in our favor. Yes, yes, we have to lose some bun fights, but the structure of the thing is centered on the US and our interests.
And it really is not realistic to expect the rest of the planet to be our puppets.

You want to understand what we're doing now? Think about how every American leader for the past 20 + years (since the end of the USSR) has repeated the phrase 'rule of law'. That's what we're driving for folks: defense of our cozy little system. And new players, like Brazil, India and China are jostlinig around trying to figure out how to get a leg up (traditional agricultural product 'patents' for instance, or shortening intellectural property exclusionary periods for two) inside the system.
It's a delicate dance, because what we don't want is to devolve once again into a divided world economy a la 1945 to 1975 with it attendant risk of nuclear war.
We don't do nearly as badly in the world as many commentators would have you believe.