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Pat Buchanan

To be fair buchanon has been isolationist for quite some time.
 
BKF is surprised that anyone is able to think outside of the party lines...why am I not surprised?
 
deacs1995 said:
To be fair buchanon has been isolationist for quite some time.
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I mean, the guy has argued that the US shouldn't have entered WWII. I'm pretty damn libertarian when it comes to foreign relations, but wow. His views have been nationally known since the '92 campaign...someone (hey BKF) hasn't been paying much attention.
 
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Not all that unusual for Pat Buchanan. IIRC hasn't he been a bit of an isolationist since the Cold War ended and especially when Israel was involved?

By the way, I pretty much agree with what Buchanan had to say in that piece.
 
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in his book he argues that all great empires have fallen due to spending money fighting wars.
 
Buchanan is very isolationist and always has been. He is a very independent thinker in that regard, and an odd combination overall. He was, after all, the Reform Party candidate in 2000.

He has long been an extremely vocal critic of the WoT.
 
If Kerry comes home with a deal to which Germany, Britain, France, Russia, China and the U.N. Security Council have signed on, will Congress spend two years trying to scuttle it? Will Congress refuse to lift sanctions on Iran even if all our principal allies have done so?


I would not be surprised to see this Congress do either/both to those two things.
 
Buchanan's dream is for the US to become an insular republic dominated by Anglos and Anglo culture just like it was in 1789. He sucks.

And holy shit I am definitely not clicking on the John Rocker Ferguson column in the sidebar. I'm sure that's filled with reasoned opinions.
 
raf44 said:
Buchanan's dream is for the US to become an insular republic dominated by Anglos and Anglo culture just like it was in 1789. He sucks.
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Meanwhile, BKF has essentially the same dream, though he and Pat probably disagree on the economic system that should be put in place.
 
deacs1995 said:
To be fair buchanon has been isolationist for quite some time.
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I do not know of anyone who is an isolationist. Maybe you are thinking about non-interventionists. These are people who ask whether a military action is in the national security interest of the US of A. For example, why are we protecting South Korea from North Korea? Why did Western governments help with regime change in Libya? Why is Turkey in NATO? Did it move? Don't get us started on the fiasco in Iraq. Oh, the president has declared Venezuela a national security threat to this country.

George Washington said no entangling alliances and commerce with all. It's still a good idea.

I believe this Cato commentary pretty much sums up feeling of the non-interventionists.

http://www.cato.org/blog/washington-should-stop-equating-ugly-regimes-security-threats

President Obama raised eyebrows last week when he issued an executive order declaring Venezuela to be a threat to national security. It would be pertinent to ask just how that deeply divided, nearly bankrupt country could menace the security of the global superpower. Venezuela has no long-range ballistic missiles or bombers, much less nuclear weapons. It does not have a large, well-equipped army. The Venezuelan navy is both small and antiquated. Although rumors continue to circulate that the leftist government of President Nicolás Maduro flirts with terrorist organizations in neighboring Colombia and elsewhere, those reports remain little more than rumors.

Most telling, Obama’s executive order did not cite evidence that Venezuela actually posed a threat to the security and well-being of the United States. Instead, it focused on the Maduro regime’s ill-treatment of the Venezuelan people. The executive order is a textbook example of an overly broad definition of national security. The White House emphasized that the order imposed sanctions on officials who undermined democratic processes or institutions, abused human rights, were involved in prohibiting or penalizing freedom of expression, or were guilty of corruption. White House spokesman Josh Earnest declared that the United States now had the tools to block the financial assets of Venezuelan officials “past and present” who dare “violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption.”

Those are all tragic aspects of that country’s dysfunctional political system. There is little question that Venezuela’s government is horrifyingly corrupt and autocratic. Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo has ably described the many abuses committed by both Maduro and his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chávez.. It may well take Venezuela a generation or more to recover from the socialist idiocies of those two rulers. But as I point out in the pages of the National Interest Online, just because a regime is repugnant does not make it a credible security threat to the United States.

Obama’s executive order is ominous because it signals a return to the overuse of national security justifications that was so common in previous administrations. It should be recalled that U.S. officials asserted, apparently while maintaining straight faces, that such small, weak adversaries as North Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, and Cuba posed dire national security threats. The ensuing policies produced frustrating, counterproductive results. Indeed, in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq, the outcomes of such a promiscuous invocation of U.S. security needs were disastrous wars that squandered hundreds of billions of tax dollars and snuffed out the lives of thousands of American military personnel. One might hope that policymakers had learned from those bruising experiences and would avoid such folly in the future.
 
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