United Liberty

The new round of NATO expansion has placed Russia on the defensive again. The EU’s flirtations with Belarus are certainly annoying the hardliners in Moscow as well.  From Reuters:

“Attempts to expand the military infrastructure of Nato near the borders of our country are continuing,” Medvedev told an annual meeting with the Defence Ministry’s staff.

Russia has described plans by the previous US administration to grant Nato membership to ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia, and to deploy elements of a US missile shield in Eastern Europe, as a direct threat to its national security.

It is natural, in an age of bailouts and government intervention, to denounce the actions being taken “for our own good” by the President and Congress, and write at length about what we shouldn’t be doing. It is my view that people look entirely too much to the government in general and the President in particular to solve problems and fix things. However, with the prevelance of that mindset, I would like to submit some ideas, for a change of pace, about what positive things a new President of the United States could and should do, given how little power under the Constitution the President has to make bold changes in policy. We can call this “what I would do if I were the new President”.

Many of us are watching with great interest to see how things are shaping up with likely appointments for the new Obama Administration. Given all the talk about “change” in this election, one would hope that the appointments would indicate some definite moves away from the status quo. Obviously the President’s powers to change much of anything are quite limited by the Constitution (not that this has mattered so much to recent Presidents), with foreign policy being the area of greatest potential for change. An initial look at Obama’s likely appointments in matters of foreign affairs and national security leads this writer to question just how much change, if any, will occur in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Back in 2006, George Clooney went on Real Time with Bill Maher in order to make the case for intervening in Darfur. Clooney compared his vision of intervention to the NATO bombing in Kosovo under then President Bill Clinton. Clooney is and was then a fierce opponent of President Bush’s Iraq policy.

The logical inconsistency there flabbergasted me then, and I still hold that view. Like Iraq, Sudan is ruled by an Arab regime empowered by oil money. Like Iraq, Sudan has been known to be more than a little hospitable to terrorists. And like the 2003 intervention in Iraq, and like various other troublespots throughout the globe, intervention in Sudan has serious potential of degenerating into a military quagmire.

When Ron Paul was asked by Reason Magazines’s Dave Weigel about write-in ballots, he had this to say-

“I don’t think that’s very productive,” Paul said of a write-in campaign. “They could do it, of course, but in most of the states it won’t count. If they can change the rules in a primary and not count all the votes, imagine what they could do with write-in votes!”