For the last few weeks I've been engaged in a long running email debate with a friend of a friend about the merits of Ron Paul. Yeah, imagine that. Ron Paul is my white whale. Anyway, lately we've been discussing the role of the military in America's foreign policy. The basic issue seems simple enough: should America's military be spread out around the world intervening in the affairs of other nations, or should the military be primarily located within our borders and primarily tasked with protecting our borders?
As I was writing my latest email I realized that there are a lot of unspoken assumptions underlying any proposed strategy for utilizing our military in support of our foreign policy objectives. So I took a step back and laid out the basic assumptions I make when I talk about these issues. Rather than transcribe the entire email in a single post, I'll break it up and look at in a few chunks that are a bit easier to manage. Here's a preview:
I believe we have real interests in the world that we have to defend. Defending those interests is only possible if we have a global military presence. We face real enemies in the world because our historical actions have placed us in conflicts with people that don't like us, but it's wishful thinking to assert that we could have avoided these conflicts in the past and it's foolhardy to pretend that we can avoid more such conflicts in the future. This is especially true because many of our worst enemies in the world are irrational operators whom we can't consistently influence without a credible threat of force.
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