The Issues, No. 36 - United States Foreign Policy

The United States is the world’s leading country and it’s also the only country in the world that is composed of people from every other country in the world. As such, I think we have a responsibility to the rest of the world. We also are dependent on other countries in the world for resources that we don’t have and so we have a responsibility to those countries in that regard as well. But I think our responsibilities should only go so far.

I don’t think we have the responsibility to force other countries to be like us or to adopt our beliefs. And I don’t believe we need to have a war with a country that hasn’t done anything to hurt us or one of our allies, regardless of how we feel about them or what they believe. I do think we have the responsibility to speak up to countries that are repressing their citizens or threatening their neighbors and I think we can try and influence them through foreign aid, trade agreements, military support agreements, and peer pressure from our allies and organizations like the United Nations.

Whatever we do we need to be careful that we do not punish the people of a country by, for instance, withholding foreign aid that may provide food or medicine when we are attempting to influence the country’s leaders to treat their people better. What we want to avoid at all costs is military intervention, or war, and I think our country’s military and political leaders have been too quick to go to war ever since World War II.

I don’t think we ever needed to have a war in Korea. I don’t think we needed to have a war in Viet Nam. And I don’t know why we are having wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I suspect that the military wants to have wars because that is what they train and prepare for and that is how they demonstrate how good they are. I think some Presidents think a war is something they need to have on their resumes and I think our Congress, because it has the authority to approve a war, needs to do a far better job of curtailing the perceived career enhancing desires of the military and the President when it comes to approving anything that is going to cost American lives.