It's Our Own Special Brand, mmm, Taste the Self Righteousness

The problem with libertarians is fairly obvious. The over riding economic/political goal of their philosophy being to take us back to the Articles of Confederation, a time in American History that didn't work then and sure as hell wouldn't work now. And, while I wholly and usually loudly disagree with that theory, there is something in there that I do find useful, and that I wish we would go back to. Isolationalism... a word that apparently in this great country of ours doesn't even show up in the spell check let alone in the political rhetoric of our leaders.

Let me begin my making this perfectly clear, isolationalism does not combat the growing sense of globalization and the interconnectedness of the global economy, and it shouldn't. There is nothing wrong with this force that is slowly remaking the world in it's image. It has led to standards of living that are slowly rising everywhere and is a force that could not be stopped even if we were to try. However, the isolationalism I espouse is more of a non-interventionist theory. In my, albeit humble, opinion, there is no reason for our troops to be on foreign soil, ever.

I'm going to make a bunch of universally unpopular statements now, and I'm okay with that. I'm going to discuss, American Imperialism. Let's begin at... well... the beginning I guess. In the late 1800's, America was beginning to feel it's power in the world as a developing country and despite the suggestions of both George Washington's final words as president, and the long standing practice of the Munroe Doctrine, both of which were designed to to keep Europe out of the America's, and vice virsa, to keep Americans out of Europe, the American people were led into a war with the declining Empire of Spain. This came about largely due to an increase in the power of the media in the form of Yellow Journalism and a hugely ineffectual president in the form of William McKinley. The war was "won" in short order and gave us two things. 1. Our first imperial possessions, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and 2. Gave us our first great imperialist leader in the form of Theodore Roosevelt. The story goes on from there. Largely due to the policies of Roosevelt the First and then Wilson the Righteous, America was once again embroiled in a war for no real reason against a European power. This time, America would win the right to trade in China as it's great Imperial concession for helping to win the war. Then came Roosevelt II and the Third War for American Hegemony, better known as World War II. Following this war, it as fairly apparent that America "strode the world like a colossus", as under our imperial domain was easily half the world, and to use a Roman analogy, the Russians were our Goths, constantly nipping at our sides while never coming under our control.

But like all great empires, this has to eventually come to an end. In the case of the Romans, it was being bleed dry from a thousand tiny pricks of both resources and native sons in war after war after war. For Britain, it was the debt brought on by the fighting of two major consecutive major wars. For us? I foresee a mixture of the two, a middle ground. We are poor as a nation, there is no doubting that, and our resources are spread incredibly thin. When we can't dedicate our armed forces to a war without almost immediately calling up Reserves and National Guard, it becomes obvious that our forces in Germany, Japan, and even South Korea, could possibly be better used. When our debt is so high that it becomes impossible to outfit them properly before sending them into another imperialistic war. These are prime signs of decline. Also, generally in the early stages of decline, people who dream of the old days of glory, the way it used to be, find their way into power, something we would today call conservatism.

There appears to be only one way to avoid the decline. One way to avoid the collapse that eventually took Rome under, eventually took London to the point where it largely ineffectual. Remove ourselves from world affairs. Return our presence from the continents and try to put our own house in order before stepping foot out of it again. Sanctions, the work of the UN, these things are fine, but the wars that we have been involved in since the late 1800's are not. We need to worry about our own collapsing economy now. We need to be trying to fix our own broken standards of democracy.