Ron Paul challenges GOP’s foreign policy agenda

Yet Americans, like Ron Paul, who advocate a policy to actually make America safer, freer, and wealthier, are routinely vilified by Republican apparatchiks. The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters accused opponents of being defeatists and even traitors. Politico guest contributor Robert White was more mild, merely accusing Paul of preaching “isolationism and appeasement” and of not appearing to be “strong on national defense.”

For these Republicans opposition to bombing or invading other nations is “isolationist.” Failing to view war or the threat of war as the best response to every foreign problem is “appeasement.”

In fact, war should always be a last resort, a matter of necessity rather than choice. And we can learn much from the Cold War: there were enthusiastic advocates of preventive war against both the Soviet Union and China, but deterrence kept the peace against the likes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. In retrospect the latter policy looks good compared to the potential of triggering World War III.

Moreover, intervention and conflict beget intervention and conflict. America’s troubles with Iran began in 1953 with the CIA-backed coup d’etat against the democratically elected government. Washington’s support for the autocratic Shah sowed the seeds which turned into the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Fear of aggressive Islamic fundamentalism caused the Reagan administration to back Saddam Hussein in the 1980s after he invaded Iran. That encouraged Baghdad to invade Kuwait. Then came the first Gulf War and Washington’s stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia. Those forces later were targeted in the Khobar barracks bombings; the U.S. presence also inflamed hostility from the likes of Osama bin Laden.

According to Paul Wolfowitz, a desire to bring home those forces was a benefit of the Iraq war. But the Iraq invasion empowered Iran, now accused of pursuing the Shah’s dream of nuclear weapons. So Washington’s sofa samurai are demanding that bombers be sent forthwith against Tehran.

It would have been much better in 1953 had Washington’s coup plotters stayed home. Much brutality, war, and horror might have been avoided.

Ron Paul isn’t likely to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2012 whatever position he takes on foreign policy. But for the last decade GOP politicians have inflated foreign threats, ignored military costs, and disregarded America’s interests in their search for political advantage. If the Republican Party wants to return to power—and especially if it genuinely wants to keep America “safe, free, and prosperous”—it will engage rather than dismiss Rep. Paul’s critique of U.S. foreign policy.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including “Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire” (Xulon Press).