Amidst the cacophony of everyday events around world, people outside the United States ought to cock an ear toward America States and listen closely for the quiet but resonant voice of a Texas gentleman named Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is a retired obstetrician, a 10 term Republican congressman from the 14th district of Texas and a Republican candidate in the 2008 race for the US presidency. And if you listen closely to Dr. Paul, you will hear the only authentic American voice in a field of nearly twenty presidential candidates from both parties.
It is, these days, both trite and inaccurate to say that u201CAmerica is a nation of laws and not men.u201D Since 1945, for example, U.S. presidents routinely have involved the United States in wars that Congress does not declare, notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution’s clear mandate that only Congress can declare war. For more than thirty years, successive U.S. Congresses and presidents have refused to enforce border control and immigration laws already on the books, thereby abetting the deterioration of America’s social cohesion, social and educational services, and national security. And for just as long, presidents, congressman, and senators of both parties have ignored the interests of everyday Americans to earn donations and retirement sinecures — both, really, barely disguised bribes — from the U.S.-based military industry, the multinational oil companies, and foreign lobbies flush with money, such as those representing Israel and Saudi Arabia. The foreign lobbies are particularly despicable because American parents pay for U.S. politicians’ kowtowing for money to these foreign entities with the lives of their soldier-children and their savings. Sadly, therefore, it is a bad joke to say that America is today a country of laws not men.
But that is why Dr. Paul’s voice is important and, increasingly, is being listened to by Americans. It also the reason that the slander machines of the Democrat and Republican parties, U.S. military-related industries and their financiers, and the foreign lobbies are working overtime to discredit and ridicule Dr. Paul. These self-appointed elites know that Dr. Paul’s voice is not only the authentic voice of Americans and their historical experience, but also potentially the voice of their doom, because impotence, shame, and drastically less war-profiteering will be theirs if the rule-of-law endorsed by Mr. Paul is reestablished in the United States.
Mr. Paul places his faith in the Constitution of the United States and the legacy left to Americans by their founding generation. The republican government created by America’s revolutionary generation was meant to be the agent of an expanding domain for freedom, liberty, prosperity, and equal opportunity at home. It was never intended to be the militarized installer of those attributes abroad. u201CWherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [the United States’] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,u201D said Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in 1821, in words that Americans are today being reminded of by Dr. Paul.
But she does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.
Dr. Paul speaks in the tradition of Secretary Adams, and in plainer words he speaks against — indeed, he damns — the bipartisan American governing class which, since 1945, has u201Cinsensibly chang[ed] from liberty to forceu201D the spirit of the American nation and people. In his campaign, Dr. Paul draws attention to the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan that have resulted from U.S. interventionism, and from the U.S. elite’s arrogant and foolish determination to be the u201Cvindicatoru201D of avaricious and ambitious foreigners who conceal their lust for arbitrary power behind the words of the American founders. He accuses and rebukes the bipartisan U.S. elite for having involved America in endless wars — especially religious wars — in which no genuine U.S. interest is at stake, and for having brazenly reached into the pockets of Americans and stolen their money to support and/or protect states — Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, etc. — that have drawn America ever more deeply into wars that are none of our business or concern.
If you listen to Mr. Paul you will hear a man devoted to his country’s welfare and his countrymen; knowledgeable about and respectful of its history; realistic about the increasingly barbaric world in which it exists; and, most of all, fully aware of the fragility of America’s republican experiment and its absolute dependence on the constant nurturing provided by the rule of law. If elected, Mr. Paul would reshape America in a direction that would be in America’s best interests.
- Going to war would once again require a formal, constitutional declaration by the U.S. Congress; the world would see America involved in far fewer wars, and none started by the whim of a single man and the foreign-influenced ideological clique around him. And when war was declared, America’s foes would absorb an application of U.S. military force that would both utterly destroy them and their supporters, and serve as a warning to other miscreants bent on doing America harm.
- Immigration and U.S. borders would re-subjected to the rule of law, and America would get the flow of immigrants it needs in an orderly manner and based protecting national security and, only then, on the needs of the country’s society and economy.
- Foreign aid would be eliminated and defense spending better targeted to real threats so as to end the tax-tyranny of a perennially spendthrift federal government; reduce the amount of debt held by foreigners, especially that held by regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia; and encourage the reemergence of the traditional but long dormant pay-as-you-go thriftiness of individual Americans and their families.
- Most important, the world would see a massively reduced U.S. voice, presence, involvement in events that have no conceivable impact on U.S. national interest. Other nations would have to begin looking out for themselves; they will have to amicably settle their religious, ethnic, tribal, and territorial spats or fight each other to the death — no U.S. cavalry will be riding to the rescue.
As you listen to Dr. Paul, you will hear his opponents describe him as an evil isolationist, but neither Dr. Paul nor America has ever been isolationist. Indeed, the term u201Cisolationistu201D is merely a deceptive slur that America’s bipartisan elite hurls at those citizens who prefer not to waste their wealth or children’s lives in other peoples’ wars. Since its inception, the United States has been a trading nation and a country fully involved in economic, scientific, educational, and commercial affairs around the world. At its best, America has been sturdily non-interventionist, recognizing both that it has more than enough to do to expand liberty’s domain and the equality of opportunity at home, and that non-essential foreign adventures can only slow or even undo liberty and opportunity for Americans at home.
In an America led by the non-interventionist Dr. Paul, the world would see a more confident and less aggressive nation; a nation more humble, prosperous, and equitable; and a nation willing to let all other nations and peoples work out their own destinies, peaceably or violently, as they wish. America would get back to its own business and interests, and the rest of the post-Cold War world’s nations would be left alone to try, at long last, to grow into responsible adults.
