Ron Paul and Foreign PolicyJanuary 15, 2008
Ron Paul invited the audience at last Thursday's Republican debate to entertain the notion that the Middle East would be a better place with the U.S. out of the picture.
"It's time that we come to the point where we believe the world can solve some of their problems without us," said the Texas congressman, who has raised a mountain of cash on the strength of such views. As President Bush completes his swing through the region, it's a thought worth considering.
Dr. Paul is a libertarian, and a libertarian's core belief is that a person's pursuit of happiness is, or ought to be, his own affair. Up to a point, most of us are probably sympathetic to that argument. But is it true of all people? And is what's true of some or all people also true of countries? The libertarian conceit -- which now extends well beyond Dr. Paul's cult-like following -- is that it is.
Thus, speaking of America's relationship with Israel, Dr. Paul insisted at Thursday's debate that "we need to recognize they deserve their sovereignty, just as we deserve our sovereignty." Of the feuds within the Arab world, he offered that "none of the Arab nations wanted Saddam Hussein in Kuwait and I think they could have taken care of Saddam Hussein back then and saved all the mess we have now."
Of Israel's relationship with its neighbors, he argued that if only America got out of the way by cutting off the aid spigot (which, he claimed, favored the Arabs by a 3-to-1 ratio), there would "be a greater incentive for Israel and the Palestinians and all the Arab nations to come together and talk." And of America's relationship with the Arab world, the congressman said in a previous debate that "they attack us because we've been over there."
Dr. Paul's own remedy is that if "we trade with everybody and talk with them . . . there's a greater incentive to work these problems out." But here's a rub.
As historian Michael Oren observes in "Power, Faith and Fantasy," his history of America's 230-year involvement in the Middle East, as early as the 1790s "many Americans had grown dismayed with the country's Middle East policy of admonishing the [Barbary] pirates while simultaneously coddling them with bribes." It was precisely out of a desire to "trade with everybody" that the early American republic was forced to build a navy, and then to go to war, to defend its commercial interests, a pattern that held true in World War I and the Persian Gulf "Tanker War" of the 1980s.
These details of history pose a problem not just to Dr. Paul's views of the Middle East, but to the intellectual architecture of libertarianism itself. Liberal societies are built on the belief in (and defense of) individual rights, but also on the overawing power of government to transform natural rights into civil ones. In the same way, trade between nations is only possible in the absence of robbers, pirates and other rogues. Whose job is it to get rid of them?
A strict libertarian might offer that mercenaries could be authorized to build aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers and nuclear submarines to keep the freedom of the seas in the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. But what happens when the pecuniary interests of mercenaries collide with the political interests of the U.S. or some other government? Ultimately, some kind of decisive power is needed there too, at least if the trading opportunities libertarians claim are so precious stand any chance of flourishing.
That isn't to say that Dr. Paul's specific arguments against American entanglement in the Middle East are purely spurious. Does U.S. diplomacy invariably facilitate peaceful outcomes in the region? The seven feckless years of the Oslo process suggest not. Does it make sense to arm Saudi Arabia and Egypt at the same time we arm Israel? The verdict will depend on what kind of governments the two Arab states have in, say, 10 years time. Should the Bush administration have backed Pervez Musharraf to the hilt these past seven years? Had it done more to cultivate democratic alternatives to the Pakistan strongman in years past, it might not have seen its Plan B vanish with Benazir Bhutto's assassination last month.
These questions turn on differences of tactics and strategy, whereas Dr. Paul's objection is philosophical. It helps his case rhetorically that he can tally the costs of America's involvement in the region -- the billions spent and thousands killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; the "blowback," as he puts it, from supporting Saddam at one moment and opposing him the next -- whereas hypotheticals are, by their very nature, costless. But that's only true while they remain hypothetical.
Nobody can say what, precisely, the cost would be of U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East or, for that matter, disengagement from rest of the world. But John McCain was on to something when he quipped, in reply to Dr. Paul, that the only items al Qaeda likes to trade in are burqas, and that they only fly on one-way tickets.
Mankind is not comprised solely of profit- and pleasure-seekers; the quest for prestige and dominance and an instinct for nihilism are also inscribed in human nature, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. Libertarianism makes no accounting for this. It assumes the relatively tame aspirations of modern American life are a baseline for human nature, not an achievement of civilization.
There is a not-incidental connection here between libertarianism and pacifism. George Orwell once observed that pacifism is a doctrine that can only be preached behind the protective cover of the Royal Navy. Similarly, libertarianism can only be seriously espoused under the protective cover of Leviathan.
That's something worth considering as Americans spend the coming year debating the course of things to come in the Middle East. It is beguiling, and parochially American, to believe that things go better when left alone. In truth, as Yeats once wrote, things fall apart. With so much at stake in this election, it's no small blessing that Dr. Paul remains a man of the fringe.
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