Posted under Conservatism & Election 2012 & History & Interventionism & Political Philosophy & Republican Party & Ron Paul
Jeffrey Lord is at it again with his simplistic and historically illiterate attacks on Ron Paul’s foreign policy. Mr. Lord has a knack for attracting rebukes from high powered thinkers. Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman have already blasted his past anti-Paul rantings. Now Daniel Larison has chimed in. As Mr. Lord has been schooled over and over, the Founding Fathers were not interventionists in any meaningful sense. So why he continues to repeat that canard, I don’t know.
The occasions for Mr. Lord’s comments is the exclusion of Ron Paul from the Republican Jewish Coalition candidate forum which I will comment on separatedly. To Mr. Lord’s credit he does argue that the RJC should have included Ron Paul, but what I want to focus on here is Mr. Lord’s flawed history. Lord says:
The Founding Fathers, for example, repeatedly intervened in countries outside U.S. borders, contrary to the impression Paul tries to give.
Umm … no they didn’t. Larison points out the problem here:
By “repeatedly intervened,” he means that they fought exactly two wars that involved putting American forces on foreign soil. Not counting the Quasi-War, the U.S. during the Founding generation waged just two foreign wars, one of which was in North America. The first of these was a war of retaliation, and the second was an ill-advised war against Britain that was at least partially justified as necessary to protect American ships and sailors. Whether or not the War of 1812 was wise (it wasn’t), it had some direct relationship to defending U.S. interests. These wars have little or nothing in common with the foreign interventions that Lord is endorsing here, and it is unlikely that the Founders would have seen any reason to intervene in foreign conflicts in Europe or Asia. We know for certain that none of the first six Founding generation administrations ever intervened in such conflicts, and we have every reason to believe that all of the first six Presidents from the Founding generation abhorred the idea of entangling the United States in the quarrels of the Old World.
C Bowen on 07 Dec 2011 at 12:56 am #
“partially justified as necessary to protect American ships and sailors. ”
This remains a bit of a dubious claim. The New England delegation denied this was happening, even though the War Hawks, the Southern War Hawks, claimed that the chief sailing states were having their sailors impressed. It was rather a WMD of those days.
There is a danger in dumbing things down to the point that one cannot distinguish between Polk’s phony war (which began with a lie) to grab land and defend a better border–which he won, and something like the War of 1812, where the Southern War Hawks, so morally conflicted for stealing Loyalist land, so wanted to invade and conquer Canada as a sort of revenge motif, they were willing to go in hoc to those hated Yankees we hear so much about, only to never recover.
Present day libertarians generally refuse to acknowledge a difference and they certainly have a point, but one should be able to distinguish a decent geopolitical ploy (Polk) versus the recklessness of the War of 1812.
Our country is broke, so all interventionist argument that attempts to sound conservative is simply moot and doesn’t deserve a serious response, only derision.
Savrola on 07 Dec 2011 at 3:28 pm #
1812 was partially about banking as well, we tell the masses today.
C Bowen on 08 Dec 2011 at 12:14 am #
It remains an excellent example of the futility and danger of “looking back” to a mythical past.
We are here right now with a future.
One thing I have learned about the War of 1812–better to mention the Rothschilds, the mention Napolean, whose invasion of Russia in…1812, had nothing to do with the resumption of conflict with Great Britain–and the assassination of the Tory leader, by one of them there lone gunmen.
JTWilliams on 10 Dec 2011 at 10:41 am #
This guy is bizarre- he’s either getting paid to try and bash Ron Paul (because Paul is changing so many hearts and minds) or he has an unhealthy obsession. We know Dr. Paul is a classical liberal, or perhaps a paleoconservative. What this neoliberal crap is- I have no idea. Just a term Lord made up to smear Ron Paul. The true neoliberal is Newt Gingrich!
Lord ahs the audacity to write such dispicable filth, then people get angry and email him or post under his article, and then Lord says, “Look these people sound violent or unstable” as if that should delegitiize our movement.