Guest Post by David Boaz
Philip Rucker writes in the Washington Post that presidential hopefuls Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul “clashed sharply Friday over President Obama’s new Cuba policy, evidence of a growing GOP rift over foreign affairs that could shape the party’s 2016 presidential primaries.” The debate over U.S. foreign policy is often inflicted with false claims of “isolationism,” but in this instance Paul correctly called out Rubio as “acting like an isolationist who wants to retreat to our borders and perhaps build a moat.”
Rucker notes that “the emerging, younger libertarian wing [of the GOP] represented by Paul” may want a different foreign policy from that established by George W. Bush. Neoconservatives and allies of other Republican presidential candidates insist that Republicans have no intention of rethinking the policy of promiscuous interventionism.
Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard tells Rucker that Sen. Rand Paul is “a lonely gadfly” on foreign policy:
“Rand Paul speaks for a genuine sentiment that’s always been in the Republican Party, but maybe it’s 10 percent? 15 percent? 20 percent? I don’t think he’s going to be a serious competitor for guiding Republican foreign policy.”
Well, let’s go to the tape. Kristol may need to read some polls. Here’s a CBS News/New York Times poll from June:
As neoconservatives and Republican senators beat the drums for military action in Syria, Republicans turned sharply against the idea — 70 percent against in September 2013.
Perhaps most broadly, a massive Pew Research Center survey in December 2013 found that 52 percent of respondents said the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” That was the most lopsided balance in favor of the U.S. “minding its own business” in the nearly 50-year history of the measure.
And then there was the YouGov poll in March that showed that “the American public has little appetite for any involvement in Ukraine….Only 18% say that the US has any responsibility to protect Ukraine.” Republicans were barely more supportive: 28 percent yes, 46 percent no.
Janet Hook of the Wall Street Journal reported on that paper’s poll in April:
Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement — an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines.
…The poll findings, combined with the results of prior Journal/NBC surveys this year, portray a public weary of foreign entanglements and disenchanted with a U.S. economic system that many believe is stacked against them. The 47% of respondents who called for a less-active role in world affairs marked a larger share than in similar polling in 2001, 1997 and 1995.
Americans, including Republicans, are getting tired of policing the world with endless wars. Support for the Iraq war is almost as low as approval of Congress. Interventionist sentiment ticked up in the summer of 2014 as Americans saw ISIS beheading journalists and aid workers on video. But even then most voters wanted air strikes, not more troops. Here’s a prediction: 13 months from now, when the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire begin voting for presidential candidates, Americans will be even more weary of nearly 15 years of war, and U.S. intervention will be even less popular than it is now. If it remains the case then, as Kristol says it is now, that the other presidential candidates are ”all in the same neighborhood” on interventionism and Paul is the only candidate calling for restraint, then don’t bet against him in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Of course, foreign policy isn’t often a priority for voters, and Paul has other pluses and minuses that will affect voters’ decisions. But after 15 years of war, being the only Republican who wants to avoid further military entanglements looks like a good position.
I always find it interesting that the GOP, claiming its followings of the teachings of Christ, scores consistently lower than the so called liberal or more atheistic party when it comes to getting involved in foreign conflicts which…not that there are less warhawks in either elected party official. Cause Hillary is just as much a warhawk as Jeb and there will be no change in foreign policy if either are elected because neither one will represent the civilian wishes.
Cuba is a non-issue. It’s not worth a pitcher of warm spit. It’s a poster child of what failed Marxist socialism looks like and a political football for south Florida politics. That’s it. Fuck Cuba. This country has much bigger fish to fry.
SSS is right but let me add this. Cuba is not some poor, put upon, abused victim of U.S. nastiness and meddling. Cuba is in the shape it is in because the Cuban people, in a moment of idiocy all too common in Latin American politics, allowed a criminal “populist”, who was in fact almost certainly a Soviet agent, to gain control of their country. Castro was not “forced” into the arms of the Soviets. He was already there when he seized power at the point of a gun. From that day onward his reign of terror has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Cuba and all over the world. He has attacked U.S. citizens and interests on thousands of occasions, often using terrorist proxies, and very nearly caused a nuclear war. I am all for good relations with all countries but the men in Cuba responsible for propping up this monster can’t be given a pass. We can and should demand an end to the Communist dictatorship before “improving relations”. This is not Vietnam or China on the other side of the world. This is a Caribbean island 90 miles from Key West. Cuba should simply be ignored until this happens. No need to change our policy at all.
Congress is nothing more than a major distraction for a majority of herd poisoned rubes still imbibed with the fantasy that America is governed by and fro Americans…nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Republic is dead. Rule of law has been supplanted by rule of man. We are now governed by the dictates of NGO’s . CEO’s , Alphabet Agency Bureaucrats ; all bowed before the great mammon, the International banking cartel.
Domestic policy is no longer written for US citizens , but for stakeholders, i.e. customers/consumers of a global corporatist oligarchy.
If you harbor any doubts about this progress from sovereign nation governed by an elected/representative government to an international puppet show read the article dated 2002 on the rise of the power of the Tranzis linked below
What are Transnational Progressives ? Why they are all about progress? You know progress? Progress is small annoying lump in your hip that suddenly , without warning metastasizes into a ravenous cancer that invades every cell of your being unto you’re reduced to quivering mass of ruined flesh, praying the inevitable end not delay…that sort of progress.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2002_04-06/fonte_ideological/fonte_ideological.html
WATCH ON THE WEST, Volume 3, Number 6, May 2002.
Talk in the West of a “culture war” is somewhat misleading, because the arguments over transnational vs. national citizenship, multiculturalism vs. assimilation, and global governance vs. national sovereignty are not simply cultural, but ideological and philosophical. They pose Aristotle’s question: “What kind of government is best?”
In America, there is an elemental argument about whether to preserve, improve, and transmit the American regime to future generations or to transform it into a new and different type of polity. We are arguing about “regime maintenance” vs. “regime transformation.”
The challenge from transnational progressivism to traditional American concepts of citizenship, patriotism, assimilation, and the meaning of democracy itself is fundamental. If our system is based not on individual rights (as defined by the U. S. Constitution) but on group consciousness (as defined by international law); not on equality of citizenship but on group preferences for non- citizens (including illegal immigrants) and for certain categories of citizens; not on majority rule within constitutional limits but on power-sharing by different ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups; not on constitutional law, but on transnational law; not on immigrants becoming Americans, but on migrants linked between transnational communities; then the regime will cease to be “constitutional,” “liberal,” “democratic,” and “American,” in the understood sense of those terms, but will become in reality a new hybrid system that is “post-constitutional,” “post-liberal,” “post-democratic,” and “post-American.”
This intracivilizational Western conflict between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism accelerated after the Cold War and should continue well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the attacks of September 11, the transnational progressives were on the offensive.
Since September 11, however, the forces supporting the liberal-democratic nation state have rallied throughout the West. In the post-9/11 milieu there is a window of opportunity for those who favor a reaffirmation of the traditional norms of liberal-democratic patriotism. It is unclear whether that segment of the American intelligentsia committed to liberal democracy as it has been practiced on these shores has the political will to seize this opportunity. In Europe, given elite opinion, the case for liberal democracy will be harder to make. Key areas to watch in both the U. S. and Europe include immigration-assimilation policy; arguments over international law; and the influence of a civic-patriotic narrative in public schools and popular culture.
In hindsight, Fukuyama is wrong to suggest that liberal democracy is inevitably the final form of political governance, the evolutionary endpoint of political philosophy, because it has become unclear that liberal democracy will defeat transnational progressivism. During the twentieth century, Western liberal democracy finally triumphed militarily and ideologically over National Socialism and communism, powerful anti-democratic forces, that were, in a sense, Western ideological heresies. After defeating its current antidemocratic, non-Western enemy in what will essentially be a material-physical struggle, it will continue to face an ideological-metaphysical challenge from powerful post-liberal democratic forces, whose origins are Western, but, which could be in the words of James Kurth, called “post-Western.”
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2002_04-06/fonte_ideological/fonte_ideological.html
[img
[/img]
What’s going on in Congress today is akin to date rape. During the course of cooing campaign promises and pretty rhetoric , the Republican politico slips their conservative date a mickey and
when the poor used victim awakens post election to the exploitation of their two party vulnerability, they are so shamed by their ignorant choices, that they remain silent , not wanting to call attention to their party inflicted spousal abuse.. people will talk.
[img
[/img]
True Libertarians are not owned by Israel.