In a world rife with examples of the damage done to the U.S. economy and our national security by Washington’s relentless and bipartisan overseas interventionism, two current situations can be cited to demonstrate the high cost of intervention, on the one hand, and the wisdom of national-interest-protecting non-intervention on the other.
The first deals with the growing likelihood of frequent and widespread attacks in the United States by Islamist militants, and the second deals with recent events in Syria and Somalia. The coming Islamist attacks in America will be the direct result of our interventionist foreign policy, while our failure to intervene — so far — in Syria and Somalia provides clears evidence that disasters, insurrections, and wars can occur in many areas of the world, have no impact on U.S. national security, and will cost us nothing in terms of lives, funds, or security if we simply refrain from intervening.
Years ago, Ralph Peters, one of America’s finest strategists, wrote that in the post-Cold War world Americans would have to learn to watch foreigners die with equanimity to avoid involvement in expensive, endless wars in which no U.S. national interests are at risk. That advice was wise then; it is even more sage today. Neither the price of bread, the status of our liberties, the baseball pennant races, nor the security of our shores has been adversely affected by our failure to ride to the rescue of the dying in Syria and Somalia. The foreigners die, life goes on, and America is not yet fighting a war in either country, which is as it should be as no national interest is in danger in either place. Washington’s failure to intervene or lead a Western intervention in Syria or Somalia may not be popular with the electronic and print media and cultural war-mongers like Obama and Mrs. Clinton, but for the rest of us it is a most positive failure, one that has paid dividends by avoiding additional wars with the Muslim world and the deaths and enormous monetary costs such conflicts would entail. Failing to intervene also helps domestic U.S. security by not sharpening the already deep-seated hatred of U.S.-citizen Muslims for their government’s foreign policy. In these ways, it seems clear that non-intervention protects Americans and their genuine interests.
