et me begin by commending you all - on the
campaign by Antiwar.com and the Center for
Libertarian Studies - to forge a new
anti-interventionist American coalition. Only an
engaged and informed citizenry can bring about a
reversal of the neo-imperial foreign policy that has
been foisted upon us in the post-Cold War era by the
elites of both Beltway parties.
Foreign policy, they tell us, is not an issue in this
election year. By that they mean it is off the table, a
matter already decided upon and settled by those
who know what is best for America. So they, and
their media auxiliaries, redirect our attention away
from foreign policy to such burning national issues as
the dating policy at Bob Jones University.
What is best for America and the world, they tell us,
is that the United States should remain a superpower
sheriff, the Wyatt Earp of the West, possessed of the
sole right to deputize posses, or go it alone if
necessary, to discipline evil-doers, wherever our
"values" are threatened. I submit that this foreign
policy poses a great and growing danger to the peace
and security of the United States.
Last year, for 78 days, U.S. pilots flew thousands of
missions against Serbia, destroying bridges, factories,
electrical grids, and, yes, even hospitals, schools and
the occasional embassy. Yet, before launching his
war, Mr. Clinton never received the authorization of
Congress. But as a consequence of our triumph over
Serbia, young men and women from California,
Kentucky, Florida and Maine are in Kosovo policing
territory that has been violently contested for
hundreds of years.
As of now, we do not know if U.S. troops will end
up fighting Serbs, or Kosovar Albanians, or first one,
then the other. But it is a near certainty that United
States will one day be forced to pull out of Kosovo,
after having earned the lasting hatred of Serbs -- a
people who never harmed the United States -- and of
the Albanians, whose aspirations will not be satisfied
until the U.S. helps to carve out an ethnically pure
Greater Albania.
Look at the balance sheet of Bill Clinton's
unconstitutional war. NATO, a defensive alliance,
launched an offensive war against a nation that
threatened no member of that alliance, dissipating the
moral authority with which NATO had emerged
from the Cold War. Serbia is smashed. Montenegro
and Macedonia are destabilized. Kosovo was purged
first of Albanians, then of Serbs. And lies in ruins.
U.S. relations with China and Russia have been
damaged. For what? So we and NATO could police
in perpetuity a Balkan province that has not the
remotest connection to U.S. vital interests. Such are
the fruits of neo-imperialism.
Meanwhile, a decade after the Gulf War, American
soldiers and airmen stand ready to die to defend
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait from Iran and Iraq - as
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait conspire with Iran and Iraq
to keep oil prices over $30 a barrel -- to loot America
and gouge U.S. consumers.
For ten years, the U.S. has played the dominant role
in maintaining rigid sanctions on Iraq. By one UN
estimate, these sanctions have resulted in the
premature deaths of 500,000 children. Will the
parents of those children ever forgive us? Even our
European Allies recoil. By keeping these sanctions
fastened on Iraq, we flout every tenet of
Christianity's Just War doctrine, and build up deposits
of hatred across the Arab world that will take
decades to draw down. One day our children shall
pay the price of our callous indifference to what is
happening to the children of Iraq.
I speak as a proud Cold Warrior who supported
every great anti-Communist initiative from JFK to
Reagan. And I support a U.S. defense that is second
to none and a foreign policy whereby America
responds resolutely to any attack on American
citizens, honor, or vital interests.
But what purpose is served by our shortening the
lives of Iraqi people who have done us no harm? If
Desert Storm could not remove Saddam Hussein,
how are the women, children and elderly of Iraq, the
victims of our sanctions, supposed to overthrow him?
And if 78 days of bombing could not eject Milosevic
from power, how does forcing the people of Serbia
to endure a brutal winter without fuel or heat
advance our goal? What happened to the moral idea
of proportionality, even in wartime, between means
and ends?
We are in an election season, and the two major
parties have made their predictable selections. Their
debate over foreign policy -- it is no news to anyone
sitting here - was devoid of any fresh thinking. Both
parties are frozen in the mindset of a Cold War that
ended ten years ago.
During one debate, John McCain singled out Iraq,
Libya and North Korea as "rogue states" and
advocated the armed overthrow of all three by
U.S.-trained and equipped armies. Pressed on what
he would do if his armies were being annihilated, the
Senator did not respond. But he did not reject the
notion that Iran, a nation of 70 million, should also be
designated a rogue state to be targeted for
overthrow.
Friends, this is hubris; this is triumphalism; this is the
arrogance of power; this is America's Brezhnev
doctrine. I single McCain out not because he in
particular is misguided, but because such ideas are
commonplace among the global gamesmen in
Washington.
Governor Bush cried out in anguish when he was
compared by Senator McCain to Bill Clinton, but he
did not utter a skeptical word about McCain's plans
for rogue regimes. Indeed, the Governor has
exhibited neither absorbing interest nor extraordinary
aptitude for foreign policy -- to put it generously. His
call last year for the war on Serbia to be waged
"more ferociously" was his one memorable foreign
policy utterance. But in the cluster of foreign policy
aides, the self-styled "Vulcans," now home-schooling
the Governor, notions of "rogue state rollback" are
music to the ear.
Among the more prominent of the Vulcans is Paul
Wolfowitz. A Pentagon aide to Bush the Elder,
Wolfowitz produced in 1992 a blueprint for war
against Russia that would utilize six carrier battle
groups and 24 NATO divisions to rescue Lithuania,
should Moscow recolonize that tiny republic.
Richard Perle, another of the "On-to-Baghdad"
brigade, is perhaps Washington's premier enthusiast
of using U.S. power to topple rogue regimes.
Another tutor to Governor Bush is his father's former
National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. A few
months ago, General Scowcroft advocated putting a
division of U.S. troops on the Golan Heights, to
police peace between Syria and Israel, thereby
insuring there would be dead Americans in any
future Syrian-Israeli clash.
Not one of the "Vulcans" embraces the new thinking
on foreign policy that has taken root in Congress and
the country in the aftermath of the Cold War. This
new thinking alarms both Clintonites who call it
"isolationist," but even more the neo-conservatives
who believe America should convert her hour of
power into a "benevolent global hegemony."
Indeed, during Clinton's war on Serbia, one
neoconservative strategist was so disheartened by
the lack of war spirit among the Republican rank-and
file, he mused about giving up and leaving the GOP
altogether.
But while many Democrats and some on the Left
are eager to challenge the Bush-Clinton New World
Order, Vice President Gore is not among them. Mr.
Gore is a Wilsonian in full. He exhibits a New
Republic-style lust for cruise missile strikes on "rogue
nations." He was all for the war on Serbia. Nor did
he allow a ray of daylight to open up between
himself and Mr. Clinton on sanctions against Iraq or
the strikes against that poison gas factory in Sudan,
that turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant.
Mr. Gore is also an acolyte of the New World Order,
ever ready to cede American sovereignty, and an
architect of Clinton's Kyoto Treaty, under which
global bureaucrats would dictate America's use of
fossil fuels. When young Americans perished in a
tragic accident over Iraq, Gore reflexively offered his
condolences to the families of those who, quote, "had
died in the service of the United Nations."
Quo Vadis? Where are you going, America?
Because of our sanctions on scores of nations, cruise
missile strikes upon others, and intervention in the
internal affairs of still others in the wake of the Cold
War, a seething resentment of America is brewing
all over the world. And the haughty attitude of our
foreign policy elite only nurses the hatred. Hearken,
if you will, to the voice of our own Xenia, Madeline
Albright, announcing new air strikes on Iraq: "If we
have to use force, it is because we are America. We
are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see
farther into the future."
Now I count myself an American patriot. But if this
Beltway braggadocio about being the world's
"indispensable nation" has begun to grate on me, how
must it grate upon the Europeans, Russians, and
peoples subject to our sanctions because they have
failed, by our lights, to live up to our standards?
And how can all our meddling not fail to spark some
horrible retribution? Recall: it was in retaliation for
the bombing of Libya that Khadafi's agents blew up
Pan Am 103. And it is said to have been in retaliation
for the Vincennes' accidental shoot-down of that
Iranian airliner that Teheran collaborated with
terrorists to blow up the Khobar towers. From Pan
Am 103, to the World Trade Center, to the embassy
bombings in Nairobi and Dar - have we not suffered
enough not to know that interventionism is the
incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some
cataclysmic atrocity on U.S. soil to awaken our
global gamesmen to the asking price of empire?
America today faces a choice of destinies. We can
be the peacemaker of the world - or its policeman
who goes about night-sticking troublemakers until
we, too, find ourselves in some bloody brawl we
cannot handle. Let us use this transitory moment of
American power and preeminence to encourage and
assist old friends and allies to stand on their own feet
and provide and pay for their own defense.
Let me state my present intent: If elected, I will have
all U.S. troops out of the Balkan quagmire by year's
end, and all American troops home from Europe by
the end of my first term. Forty years ago, President
Eisenhower pleaded with JFK to bring all U.S. troops
home from Europe. Certainly, sixty years after the
end of World War II, and fifteen years after the
Berlin Wall fell, is not too soon to get all U.S. troops
out of Europe and let Europeans provide and pay the
cost of their own defense. If not now, when?
And let us quickly adopt a measure of humility about
how much we know about what is best for other
peoples and cultures. In the words of the great
scholar Russell Kirk: "There exists no single best
form of government for the happiness of all mankind.
The most suitable form of government depends on
the historic experience, the customs, the beliefs, the
state of culture...and all these things vary from land
to land and age to age."
We are entering a fertile and exciting time in our
politics. Our ossified two-party system, that has
managed to stifle serious foreign policy debate for a
decade, is cracking up. Pressure is growing from
dissidents within, and this year, there will be a mighty
challenge from without. As Joe Namath said, I
guarantee it.
Our Reform Party will be on the ballot in 50 states,
and, if I have anything to say about it -- and I expect
to -- it will become a non-interventionist party, a
peace party, that will reach out to Americans of
Right and Left who reject the Third Way imperialism
being forced upon us by the elites of both Beltway
parties.
In this new era, many of us are rediscovering the old
distrust of crusading that was at the center of the
world view of the old American Right. We are
conscious of our love for this country. We do not
wish to isolate America from the world, only to
isolate America from wars -- the religious, ethnic,
and territorial wars of less fortunate lands. We know
there is a powerful body of American thought --
from Washington to John Quincy Adams to William
Jennings Bryan and Robert Taft -- as well as all the
near forgotten figures written about by Justin
Raimondo and others -- to help guide us. And their
message is one I intend to stamp upon our banners in
the campaign of 2000: A Republic, Not an Empire!
America First!
