Ron Paul on Intervention

Thu, 07/02/2009 - 6:46pm | posted by Michael Orion Powell

Ron Paul had an op-ed piece in the Washington Times today, in which he made the case for non-interventionism. As a voter who supported Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican Primaries, I thought it important to point out where Paul’s argument begins to have some holes:

5. We stay out of the internal affairs of other nations. America should conduct trade, travel and diplomacy with all willing nations. Intervention, however, always has unintended consequences and almost always gets us in trouble. For example, in 1953, our CIA helped overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and installed the Shah of Iran, a ruthless dictator. The blowback from our actions was in large part responsible for the extremist Iranian Revolution of 1979, the taking of our hostages and the many problems we have had with Iran ever since. So much of our intervention makes no sense. We backed Saddam Hussein for much of the 1980s, and then twice went to war against him. In the 1990s, we bribed North Korea not to pursue atomic weapons with nuclear technology, and Kim Jong-il used that assistance to build several nuclear bombs.

Intervention simply does not serve our long-term interests.

While I generally agree that American policy should be non-intervention, there are certain cases in which intervention simply has to happen. It should be a last resort, but it should still be a resort and human compassion should step above ideology. In the case of the Yugoslav genocide, the Europeans had absolutely failed to do anything about it, even though it was happening right on their doorstep. The United Nations had been successful in getting shot at, but the New York bureaucracy isn’t built to shoot back. The United States was the only entity in the world that could intervene.

That doesn’t warrant the military industrial complex we have however. I’m sure we could have taken out Slobodon Milosevic with a military half the size of what we have now.