This is from a column I wrote 31 years ago, and I still think it is accurate!
“Only the dead have known the end of war.”- Plato
I beg to disagree Plato. First of all, given the choice of your philosophy or Aristotle’s, I’ll take his anytime. Second of all, you forgot to include, in your wise sayings, that neutral nations never know the beginnings of war.
Neutrality. That’s a dirty word to our military establishment and sector of society, which thinks we should be the ‘policeman of the world.’ Eisenhower warned us, that we should be leery of the ‘military-industrial complex,’ which gets rich off of the “police actions,” we seem to love to operate at taxpayer and life expense. We would be far better off if we copied the Swiss, who haven’t had a war in hundreds of years, and are rich, peaceful, and have one of the highest standards of living in the world. Neutrality, would have kept us out of Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Kuwait, plus, all the other places our troops were and still are stationed, which in 2024, are over 750 ‘bases,’ all around the world.
(We got into WW II, because were attacked, and WW I, was about over before we mistakenly got into it. The details about our involvements in both, will always be controversial.)
Why should we be the big arbitrator, peace keeper, conflict solver, and democracy spreader of the world? What gives us the right to tell anyone what to do? Maybe it’s because we have a higher crime rate, consume more drugs, and owe more money, than any other nation. If we were neutral, we would have but a fraction of the armed forces we now have, all soldiers would be on our shores, there would be no foreign aid, give no advice, mind our own business, and not be a member of that useless United Nations, which has yet to solve any problem anywhere.
What happened to the Soviet Union, which we spent probably a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives fighting? It collapsed in total bankruptcy, thanks to its own idiocy, and I think China will soon go the same way, for the same reasons. Are Vietnam and Cambodia better off now, after 58, 000 dead Americans, and probably a million wounded and permanently disabled? The same with Korea and Iraq? Has any nation ever loved us for all the foreign aid we have provided them, our troops we have sent, or the inflation we have suffered, because our generosity? Wealth doesn’t give wisdom, and neither does might make right. Our armed forces are scattered about throughout the entire world by the tens of thousands, in hundreds of bases, and what for? The answer usually given, is that ‘we are protecting ourselves,’ by maintaining bases and troops everywhere, but in most cases, we are only angering the host nations, and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and lives. We are protected by two huge oceans, and possess the most sophisticated missiles, bombs, and military paraphernalia anywhere, and they should be kept here. Why should we sell our technical superiority to anyone? Keep it ourselves!
We should guard our wealth, patents, brains, and security, by keeping out Chinese students, as a first idea, and make our own prescription drug contents also; just to name one or two ideas I have, but there are dozens more, I am certain. The Russian ruble is worth a penny in U.S. dollars, and the Chinese yuan, a few cents more, but we have the civilization for which others envy, but all the wars and police actions, foreign aid, and generosity beyond counting, have given us a national debt of over $34 trillion. We should be a nation with secure borders, be neutral, keep our wealth and opinions, to ourselves.
Foreign nations will ‘take us over?’ If we were neutral, and prohibited any foreign ownership of anything in America, what would there be to ‘take over?’ If we guarded our wealth, rather than giving it away, as we so often do, it may be possible to re-gain what we have lost and foolishly given away. As JFK said, before he was assassinated, “I’m going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” and they killed him. What a great idea! Our State Department, which had but 15 employees when we were founded, now has over 58,000 employes, and if we were neutral, it could be less than one percent of that.
The primaries are at hand in the U.S. Would any candidate run on a platform of neutrality? Bring the troops home, close foreign bases, and keep our wealth, and knowledge here? I doubt it, but if anyone had the courage to run on it, the popularity would be astounding…I think anyway.
Don Stott don@coloradogold.com