Do Americans Think...

Are you familiar with the Dual Containment Policy?

 

...Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate...
--George Washington

 

The low-level agents and officials who actually execute US foreign policy may be guided by good intentions, but the elites who control and direct US foreign policy are governed exclusively by motives of profit and power.

 

That doesn't work in the real world. Leaving other nations to their own devices is like leaving a house down the street to fall into disrepair and chaos. You don't own it. It's not your business. Technically true. But ultimately helps bring the whole neighborhood lower.

 

Trade only. Money guarantees equality. Think of money only.

 

When and if they attack your homeland then you engage without mercy taking on the characteristics of the raging, ferocious beast.

You show the next potential aggressor why they should think more deeply.

 

Domestically American society is about as good as its going to get. This is definitely not true overseas.

And if the government screws up working on American society then its a big deal. Not so much if it screws up with other nations.

 

You don't wait for a fire to spread to your roof before trying to put it out.

 

Of course not. At the first shot against your land you become the raging, ferocious beast with the goal of killing all enemy people on their own land.

You cause the next potential aggressor to think more deeply.

 

Why does it always take the cons in the country 20 yrs to realize the mistakes they always make.
I've said forever, we don't need to meddle in ME. But they have oil, so Cons want to meddle so that the USA has some control.
There is no other reason to ever be in the ME.
Now I read, we are putting more troops/etc in Saudi Arabia.
More con meddling.

 

You also don't start your neighbors house on fire so you can put it out.

 

Drill baby drill. Fill baby fill. Up to topoff. All from resources of our own.

 

The U.S. did not put Saddam Hussein in power. Virtually none of the weapons Iraq possessed were of U.S. manufacture. Most were Soviet with a few French thrown into the mix. Remember what Henry Kissinger said about the Iraq invasion of Iran? He paraphrased Churchill talking about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. "Pity they both can't lose".

 

I don't believe that. It is true in some cases but not all. In the case of the US, I think far more than profit and power, foreign policy is driven by the reality of limited energy supplies. And not just the US. Even Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to protect the oil supplies for Japan. The middle east is ALL about oil. Carter is the only President since Truman to authorize the use of nukes in the battlefield. He did this when Soviet troops were poised to sweep across the middle east and take over our critical oil supplies. It was a matter of national security. If we lost our supply of ME oil back then, the nation would have come a grinding halt. We saw that with the shortages in the 70s.

There was the red scare. And the fight to stop the spread of the Soviet and their stated intent to crush us, drove much of geopolitical considerations. It was a war of ideologies and it was real. Much is the same with terrorists. But beyond that, energy and resources are the real drivers of warfare.

 

I wouldn't say we never need to meddle in the ME, only that we shouldn't have large amounts of ground troops for fighting.

 

This is such nonsense. The US is separated from Europe and Asia by two gigantic oceans. And should the need arise, the US is more than capable of defending itself from any adversary. There is simply no reason to go abroad in search of dragons to slay. Not only has this policy of interventionism failed on purely practical terms, it has squandered TRILLIONS of dollars that could have gone towards things Americans NEED right here at home. For the money the US wasted on the Iraq war alone, America could have fixed every road and bridge in the country.

 

Really?

Leaving Afghanistan to its own devices after we helped them force the Soviets out led directly to three thousand dead and a big hole blown in Manhattan. Have you forgotten that?

The United States is not defendable from within its own borders.

 

What a bunch of bullcrap. How can anyone believe such nonsense?

The difference between what America is right now and what it is capable of being is gigantic.

The interventionist foreign policy you advocate is responsible for stealing an entire future away from this country.

Thousands of brave Americans who died in needless wars overseas would be alive right now, contributing to our society, and bringing joy to their families.

Instead, they rot in the ground as their devastated families visit a grave site.

That's on YOU.

What a rotten thing to say.

 

The US starts the fires and then pretends to put them out after the fact.

 

And if all nations aren't interested? Which they aren't now and never have been?

 

BS. The ME for instance has been on fire for the last fourteen hundred years.

 

Exactly.

The US political class sends the CIA into another country, sows chaos, and then tells the American people that we need to spend trillions of dollars fixing the problem.

It's a racket propped up by lies and propaganda.

 

You should try reading the entirety of that statement instead of cherry-picking one clause and viewing it in isolation.

 

The CIA helped Saddam rise to power during the cold war. And the US provided Saddam's regime with technological and logistical assistance that helped him remain in power. Then Saddam started charting his own course, independent of his former masters, and so he was targeted for removal based on the gigantic lie that he had "weapons of mass destruction" which posed a threat to America.

 

Nope it is absolutely true. We are all guilty of something or the other, you me everyone. It may not be worthy of death but it is none the less not innocent. We drop out the shoot selfish and a good life is the one that ends with the one who lived it some what less selfish than when he or she began.