Getting Out of Endless Wars

At Townhall.com Kurt Schichter makes the case that The Elite Hate the Trump Doctrine Because It Puts America First. I have not liked all of Trumps policies, particularly his waffling on gun rights. But I have appreciated his putting American interests ahead of foreign interests in matters such as border enforcement, trade, and the ending of American involvement in endless wars. These are all good things. Other countries' leaders do the same thing. Russia seeks hegemony over the whole world. China does too. They seek it because then they can impose their wishes on the World, and...shockingly enough...they and their people will become rich. But each of these countries will become rich by exploiting other countries, not by building better mouse traps. We have become rich by building better mouse traps. But since our elites don't build much of anything, they want to tear down the system that encourages people to build better mouse traps.

 Here's Schlichter:

What our betters – those same smug geniuses who brought us Iraq, let NATO deadbeats string us along, and who let Mexico and China exploit us – truly hate is the fact that the American people stood up in 2016 and demanded that our foreign policy stop sucking. Americans are sick of always getting handed the bill for some lame ruling caste priority, whether it’s paying for the privilege of defending Europe on behalf of ungrateful continentals or funding the weird climate religion or letting China get rich off of gutting our industries. Mostly, we are sick of shipping our magnificent warriors off to die in ill-conceived, poorly-planned, ineptly-executed wars where we ended up shedding our boys’ (and girls’) blood refereeing fights that go back a dozen centuries.

The coastal elite gets to bask in the radiance of its own moral superiority for deploying young people in camo from Nebraska farms and Texas towns, and we get to hold the funerals.

Hard pass.

Here's the problem. When you've got a large, well fed and funded military, you have to use it to justify keeping it large, well fed and well funded. So, the liberals kept insisting that we use our military as the policemen of the World. But we are not the World's policemen. Nobody has assigned this job to us. We have just assumed the position...for what? Republicans should be in favor of reducing our military force to a minimum and using the money to pay off our debts. Now some of these debts no doubt can be written off because they were incurred helping others in their wars. But after writing down our debts incurred fighting other peoples wars, we still have huge national debts. A debtor nation is not entirely free to act. Just as one who is in debt must pay the one who holds the mortgage, so a debtor nation must do as the one who holds its bonds instructs.

Second, and I should have put this first, wars involve killing.  God's Sixth Commandment states that  "Thou Shall Not Murder."  Now, war may come to us, in the form of a foreign invasion, in which case we are bound to defend ourselves.  If one must kill in such circumstances, it is justified.  However, when we go overseas to another country and kill others who would not be shooting at us if we weren't there, I suspect our God would frown upon such behavior.  Getting into little wars all over the world may have made sense in the Cold War days, when we were trying to contain Russian aggression, but today we are in classic "balance of power" politics.  And we don't have to take the gambit of being the World's policemen.

Getting out of wars requires getting out of wars. And sometimes, it’s going to be ugly. But unless you can explain to the family of a dead soldier why it’s worth it to stay, it’s not worth it to stay. The American people, at least those who aren’t in DC or the media, understand that every problem around the world is not our problem. If you’re one of those Citizens of the World, then feel free to enlist in the Army of the World. Just count us out of your bloody altruism.

Amen