If I were president, I would do the following in regards to foreign affairs:
- Re-establish President George Washington’s insistence on no long term alliances, and no adventurism in the world. We are not the world’s police force.
- Get out of unnecessary wars and conflicts. This would include most of the Middle East. Reduce our 95 overseas bases to about 1/3 that number.
- Compromise with Russia. We get out of Syria and most of the Middle East, if they remain neutral towards Eastern European nations. I’d rather we were defending those who are clearly allies, than fighting thousand year old wars between nations run by tyrants and terrorists.
- North Korea: Placating NK no longer works, as it has in the past. Today they have a dozen nukes. A decade from now, NK could have 100 nukes, able to hit America. We must tell China that their past methods to control NK have not worked on Kim Jong Un. With the murders of an American and Kim Jong Un’s brother,, and continual efforts to test nukes and guided missiles, NK has shown itself belligerent and a clear and present danger to all its neighbors. We must tell China that either they must depose Kim Jong Un, or we will.
- If we must fight NK, the first thing to do after notifying South Korea and Japan, is to send a huge EMP hit on all of North Korea. With systems fried, most of their equipment, missiles, etc., will not work.Then we hit all of their military and government locations.
- With dialogue and agreement with China, we replace the government. I’d rather have a peaceful communist nation like Vietnam, than to continue having a crazy megalomaniac terrorizing the area.
- Build the wall. Whether electronic or actual wall, does not matter to me. We build it, not to keep good immigrants out, but to control entrance to terrorists and drug cartels.
- Create big doors for good immigrants to enter within. Especially encourage young families to enter. Do not give them welfare assistance. Let them work their way up the system, as did my great-grandparents, who came over a century ago from the Ukraine and became farmers in North Dakota.
- Require immigrants to being learning English and the concepts behind the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. If they someday wish to be good citizens, they must understand what makes America great (and it isn’t Donald Trump).
- Allow immigrants to replace the 50 million aborted babies we’ve had since the early 1970s, paying into Social Security and Medicare. Their numbers will prop up those programs, which currently are on the verge of bankruptcy.
- Be an Ensign to the Nations of Freedom and Liberty. George W Bush’s idea of forcing freedom onto other nations proved to be a failure. Barack Obama’s Arab Spring proved to be a failure. We must stop trying to impose freedom onto peoples who are not ready for it. Let them cause their own freedom, with us supplying the inspiration.
- Ronald Reagan stayed out of most wars. Yet, he inspired nations towards freedom. When nations prepared themselves for freedom, we were available to teach them how to use it best. We must do the same.Because of Reagan’s method, a billion people experienced freedom. Since then, new failed methods of intervention have enslaved hundreds of millions. Neo-conservatism has failed us, as have progressive interventions.
Such would be my beginning for Foreign Affairs.
How would you manage Foreign Affairs if you were president?
Hi Ram,
Here are my thoughts:
I would note that #1 and #3 are in conflict as I read them. How can we abandon long-term alliances AND adopt a policy of defending our old allies? #3 is also the most horrific suggestion I have heard in some time. Are you proposing to leave the region surrounding Israel to the whims of the Russians and the Muslim world? Are we trying to set up Armageddon?
#4 is in absolutely incongruent with #2. Get out of wars and conflicts, but depose world leaders we find dangerous? Isn’t that conflict and likely to cause war? And how do we do that while closing military bases and ceasing to be the world’s policeman?
#5 You really believe that terrorists and drug dealers will have a hard time circumventing a wall? Seriously? They seem quite adept at tunneling under anything they want to!
#6 Supplying inspiration? What does that mean?
#7 Ronald Reagan provided inspiration and avoided war? I don’t think I agree with your assessment of Reagan. In the early 1980’s, he criticized every arms control agreement, including SALT II. He despised Nixon’s policy of Detente. He scared the heck out of the Russians by engaging in an arms race (Remember the MX system, which the Church opposed?) and proposing SDI. This arms race decimated the Soviet economy and harmed our own by creating an enormous deficit.
President Reagan’s administration and the State Dept. assisted munitions firms in exporting munitions all over the world. The U.S. covertly delivered weapons to anticommunist insurgents in countries allied with the Soviet Union. Remember President Reagan authorizing the transfer of weapons to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (among whom we saw a young Osama ben Laden), rebel forces in Angola, and those anti-Sandinista “Contras” in Nicaragua? And I hope you remember the sale of anti-tank missiles to our enemy Iran to finance those arms deliveries to the Contras.
Is Iran-Contra an example of Reagan’s inspiration? Arms for hostages and the violation of a U.S. arms embargo to provide arms to a third world rebel force? Were the Contras ready for “Freedom?” They were guilty of torturing and murdering political opponents, raping women, cocaine smuggling and targeting health care workers for assassination. After Reagan they essentially emerged as a terrorist force. The Sandinistas lost power in an election after the Contras had been disbanded.
I think we are long past the time when we could ever even contemplate being an isolationist fortress island. The world is interconnected socially, politically. economically, and religiously. If we tried to withdraw from the world our standard of living would fall like a rock and then we would have unrest at home like we haven’t seen in multiple generations. Church headquarters would be cut off from the saints abroad, our missionaries would become defenseless in many areas of the world. The work of the Church would mostly grind to a halt.
The critical role of the United States of America from an eternal perspective was to be the cradle of the Restoration and the protector of the Church throughout the world. The country barely passed this test initially (technically it failed as the Saints left the US for what eventually became part of the US but was not when they left). The country has done better at protecting the missionary force as the Gospel spread. The US passport has been the primary means of spreading the Gospel in the latter-days. All that goes away if we become an isolationist island.
I agree the countries/organizations you mention are a mess, but all we can do is strive to improve circumstances as we are able. Allowing an on-going significant number of skilled immigrants annually would be a very good idea. The rest of it I don’t think there is a lot we can do other than what we are doing. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump did/will respond/react and try to break particular groups, and possibly even make a little bit of progress – but likely the results won’t be all that impressive. The only peace maker in the Middle East that managed to broker a peace deal that lasted at all was Carter – and the zealots in Egypt and Israel killed the men who sign the agreement.
Life is full of paradoxes and incongruences, isn’t it? My son (still a teenager) is all in favor of world peace, but he would also like to be a hero and get a medal. When we’re wishing, that’s how it is.
Nowhere do I speak about isolationism. Note I still preserve some overseas bases and open the door for legal immigration.
We can have allies without engaging in entangling alliances. Such has pushed us into the Bosnian war that Europe should have handled on its own. Same with our endless wars in the Middle East, where on one front we fight ISIS and on another front we are their allies. If we truly supported Israel, we would not try to depose Syria’s leader, who is less a threat than ISIS.
Reagan wasn’t perfect, but was trying to defend the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas, while trying to fix decades of Middle East meddling by the USA.
I would decriminalize drugs en masse. Prohibition leads to crime and prohibits honest discourse about what “drugs” actually do (and how they might even be beneficial–“every herb” and all that).
If you want to break the foreign cartels, the way to do that is to force them to compete on the open market, not grant them a black-market monopoly.
If you want to fight addiction at home, the way to do that is to bring it into the open. People can’t honestly admit to a problem that they can be arrested for revealing.
I know, I know. Everyone will become a junkie overnight if everything’s legal. Deterrence is way more important. Etc.
Balderdash.
Mormontarian,
Good points. For me, these issues are more in the domestic affairs arena, which I will discuss in future posts.
Fair point. That is more domestic than foreign, though it would certainly affect our relations with Mexico and South America.
On the foreign front, I agree with getting out of the middle east, with one exception. Our driving foreign policy goal under the Mormontarian regime (heh) would be the pursuit of a free and independent Kurdistan. The Kurds are pretty much the only effective freedom-fighters in the region that are actually fighting for freedom, and they deserve every ounce of support we can give them (and they, generally speaking, freaking LOVE America).
A free and independent Kurdistan is where we should build a big fat air base so we can bid farewell to Incirlik and any further entanglements with Turkey. If Turkey doesn’t like it, they can leave NATO.
Since I would be for reducing our involvement in NATO, and am concerned about Turkey as an entangled alliance, I would not be opposed to helping the Iraqi Kurds set up a free state, if possible.
An independent Kurdistan is inevitable, I think. And they’d be a great ally.
The article brings up some good points.
The Arab Spring was not a failure and was not meant to impose freedoms. The Arab Spring did exactly as Obama planned. It put in power the Muslim Brotherhood, a terror organization who also wants to establish a Caliphate.
This is why Egypt now has an arrest warrant out for Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The Egyptian people were able to overcome the brutal Morsi and get rid of him.