Ron Paul challenges GOP’s foreign policy agenda

America’s safety is compromised because we are more often at war and at risk of war. Indeed, intervening promiscuously and setting tripwires around the world has kept the U.S. involved in conflict almost constantly after the Cold War.

Iraq is the most obvious disaster. More than 4,000 dead and tens of thousands maimed or injured Americans. Total cost likely to hit $2 trillion. The U.S. military overstretched. Iran’s strategic position greatly strengthened.

In fact, many Republican legislators apparently have come to recognize reality in Iraq. When asked how many GOP congressmen believed that the Iraq war had been a mistake, a panel of three Republican members at a recent Cato Institute conference agreed: “almost all of us.”

But it could be far worse. It appears that top Bush administration officials debated launching air strikes against Russian forces during Moscow’s conflict with Georgia.

Ponder the thought: After the U.S. made it through the Cold War without getting into a shooting match with the Soviet Union, Washington officials considered attacking that nuclear-armed power to defend a country which: by most accounts other than its own started the fighting; was not party to any military alliance or treaty with America; and was irrelevant to U.S. security. Had the administration initiated military action, the unsuspecting American people could have found themselves in a nuclear confrontation and even war in August 2008.

Such are the risks to Americans’ safety when their government plays globocop.

The national security state also has made Americans less free. A century ago social critic Randolph Bourne observed: “War is the health of the state.”

The U.S. was created as a constitutional republic, with a limited national government bounded by law. Yet the last Republican administration claimed that the president could unilaterally, subject to review neither by Congress nor the courts, order the arrest and indefinite detention of American citizens in America. In effect, the president asserted that he was an elected monarch or dictator, presumed infallible and beyond reproach. The defining characteristic of the so-called Patriot Act and other such enactments was not the expansion of federal power, but the refusal to hold accountable those who exercised the new power.

Finally, Americans are less prosperous. While U.S. citizens pay to defend dozens of nations around the world, those countries invest in business enterprises, economic research and development, and generous welfare states. Trade competitors cheerfully accept U.S. military troops while excluding commercial products.

The defense budget is the price of our nation’s foreign policy, and the price is high. The U.S. is spending more than $700 billion annually on the military. In real terms that is more than at any point during the Cold War, Korean War, or Vietnam War. Today America accounts for roughly half of the globe’s military outlays.

This is a year when the deficit will run almost $1.6 trillion. When America faces $10 trillion in deficits over the next decade. When Washington’s debt is climbing skyward. And when Social Security and Medicare face unfunded liabilities of an astounding $107 trillion.