Amidst the increasingly degrading situation in Ukraine, a number of American commentators are calling on President Biden to enter into negotiations with Russia in an attempt to resolve the crisis.
I’ve got a better idea: the U.S. government should instead butt out of the crisis entirely. It should immediately stop furnishing military and financial aid to Ukraine, withdraw from NATO, abandon all U.S. military bases in Europe, and bring all U.S. troops home from that part of the world and discharge them into the private sector.
That’s just the first step.
The U.S. government should then abandon all other foreign military bases around the world and bring home all troops stationed overseas and discharge them too. While they might be needed to police the world, there are not needed to defend the United States from a foreign invasion, especially given that there is not one single European, Asian, or African nation that has the military capability, manpower, logistics, money, or even interest to cross the ocean and invade and conquer the United States.
In other words, the U.S. government should leave the people of the world alone. It has already wreaked enough death, damage, and destruction with its long-time policy of foreign interventionism.
Yes, I fully realize that the Pentagon is responsible for ginning up this crisis in the hope of “degrading” Russia by giving it another “Vietnam,” just as U.S. officials did when they induced the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in 1979. That was what NATO’s absorption of former members of the Warsaw Pact was all about. It was also what NATO’s threat to absorb Ukraine was all about — to knowingly and deliberately cross Russia’s “red line” in the hope of miring Russia in another deadly, expensive, and destructive war.
But just because the U.S. government ginned up this crisis doesn’t mean that it has to be part of the solution to it. Given the extreme anti-Russia hostility that has characterized the U.S. national-security establishment since the late 1940s and its 75-year quest to destroy Russia, the possibility that U.S. officials could play a constructive role in resolving the Ukraine crisis is virtually nonexistent.
What is of foremost importance, especially given the now very real threat of life-ending nuclear war that the Pentagon’s interventionism has foisted upon us, is that the American people begin thinking about restoring our nation’s founding foreign-policy of non-interventionism. No, I didn’t say “isolationism.” I said “non-interventionism.”
Today, we have a hybrid system of interventionism and isolationism. The Pentagon and the CIA have been unleashed to wreak chaos, crisis, coups, assassinations, torture, sanctions, embargoes, wars, partnerships with dictators, aid to dictators, invasions, occupations, and foreign military bases around the world.
At the same time, the American people have been increasingly isolated from the world, in large part because all that interventionism has made it unsafe for Americans to interact with the world. That’s where the walls, trade wars, tariffs, travel restrictions, sanctions, embargoes, and immigration controls come into play.
What we need instead is to rein in and “isolate” the Pentagon and the CIA and unleash the American private sector to freely interact with the people of the world. Best of all would be to restore America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic and rid our nation of the scourge of a national-security state.
By restoring our nation’s founding systems of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy, we would be well on the way toward getting our nation back on the right road — the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
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