Maggie's Farm

Rand Paul panders to Americans' exhaustion with the failures wrought by half-measures that have marked down US effectiveness and credibility in the world. To do so without a policy of concrete measures that must be taken in the real world is directly akin to the empty pandering of Barack Obama in 2008. Is that the repeat disaster we want, of a continued dangerous downward spiral for the US interests and security. 

Angelo Codevilla:

In short: today, any number of people in the Muslim world are “messing with us,” while the Chinese and Russian governments are setting about doing so even more seriously. They feel safe in doing so. For a generation, the U.S. government has been interfering in other peoples’ business while neglecting our own—making commitments without consideration of what it would take actually to keep them. It has spoken loudly while whittling down America’s stick. We have earned disrespect. Today, nobody takes America seriously. Would-be President Paul has made clear that his America would speak much more softly. Good. But he seems to have given little thought about what kind of stick the U.S. government needs to secure America’s peace as well as about what strokes may be needed to restore respect.
Today, China is building a military reasonably designed to control the western Pacific Rim from land bases. How would President Paul counter that? China has warned that any serious attempt to safeguard the independence of the islands off its coast might lead to the nuclear destruction of American cities. Would President Paul defend America against Chinese missiles, or Russian ones? As Muslim potentates from Palestine to Pakistan consider whether to (send or allow, it matters not) any of their zealots to kill more Americans, what reason would President Paul give them to hold them back? If and when terrorists from country X strike America, what if anything would he do to those in power there? In the meanwhile, what would he do to signal seriousness? Would he continue to subsidize the Palestinian Authority’s nursery of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism?

The Obama-Paul paths in foreign policy are immoral in
undermining self-preservation and in tossing lives into avoidable horrors. Barack
Obama and Rand Paul’s foreign policies are similar in their appeal to tiredness
to argue for US non-involvement with the difficulties of the world. This
amounts to an existential defeatism to avoid the difficulties of being involved
in the world by avoiding the moral and physical exertion of US power even when
and where it could be effective. The extremism of this withdrawal endangers our
security by encouraging the spread of barbaric enemies sworn to our
destruction. Along the way, many millions of innocents are slaughtered or
brutally enslaved.

Both Barack Obama and Rand Paul are products of trends in
thinking about foreign policy that are imbued with erroneous lessons.

Barack Obama epitomizes those who at a young age adopted the
anti-Vietnam war mantras of the US evilly standing athwart the path of leftist
myths supporting communist expansionism thinly masked as harmless peasants
uprising against overlords. Although letting themselves be manipulated by hard
leftists at root they were selfishly trying to avoid the draft and continue
their peaceful existences in the bosom of US wealth and comforts. Some became dedicated
to foreign foes but most to leftist myths. They ignored that the incrementalism
that dribbled our military into the Vietnam war shucked the tried-and-true
military and political strategy of applying overwhelming force and allowed the
enemy to match and adapt. At every opportunity they created new myths of our
brutality and did all they could to blacken the reputation of US soldiers and
Marines, while ignoring the gross and purposeful policies and practices of
terror and slaughter practiced by the communists. Then, when at huge costs we
still succeeded by 1972 in eliminating the communist threat to the South and
building largely self-reliant Asian nations that were formerly at risk, the
dedicated anti-Vietnam apparatchiks led hysterics in canceling our pledges to
the South of arms, air support and logistics, which led to the loss of South Vietnam
in 1975.

Defense of this mindset requires belief that Vietnam was
unwinnable among Barack Obama and most of his foreign policy supporters. Adherence
to this critical error has led their attachment to opposition to every forceful
US foreign policy exertion since.

Rand Paul was raised in this defeatism as spread through the
media and academia by the anti-Vietnam cohorts of Obama. But Paul does not see
the US as evil. Instead his defeatism masks itself in an isolationism based on
a selfishness that believes it can ignore and be insulated from the threats
from abroad and believes that the application of US power is not worth the
bother. In these key respects it shares the existential defeatism among Obama
supporters. This attachment among Paulist isolationists similarly requires
ignoring US successes and concentration on less beneficial outcomes.

Due to the shortage of US military forces following the
demilitarization during the Clinton years, Bush did not have the time nor
support among those more interested in domestic policies to build our forces to
the levels needed to match our commitments. We withdrew from Afghanistan after
2002 and then haltingly re-committed US forces after allowing the taliban to
rebuild, we committed too few forces to Iraq until the temporary and winning “surge”
of 2008 and then too hastily and excessively withdrew our military thus wasting
movement toward a functioning and more representative government and allowing
Iran to expand its influence in Iraq.

The results in encouraged and enlarged hostile terrorists
across the Middle East, furthered by the Obama delusions about an “Arab Spring”
allowing extremists to wipe out those more moderate, are highly threatening to
the security of the US and the West. The terrorists have spread widely in the
territory and resources they command. They are vocal about and capable of
striking us at home.

The Obama administration and most of the media are being as
avoiding and negligent as before 9/11. The Rand Paul isolationists are allies
of this avoidance of self-preservation, while also avoiding the widespread
horrors suffered by millions in the region.

The very limited and very late small measures by the Obama
administration are unlinked to a strategy but mere thin window
dressing to hide its negligence and unlikely to bear positive results. Rand Paul, at least
avoids these lies but also avoids the paths that are necessary.

Hillary Clinton mouths empty words about being a bit more forceful than Obama. She tries to position
herself as wiser despite the contrary evidence of her uselessness as Secretary
of State. Given a choice between Hillary
Clinton and Rand Paul in 2016, the world will suffer more insecurities,
millions more suffer, allies defect, and the US and West will likely be
punished by more 9/11s or worse.

Both the Obama and the Paul
foreign policies share a common immorality of failure to protect ourselves nor
care about the fate of others. The big question is whether the American
electorate will endorse their immorality.