In roughly one year, President Obama plans to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq, and in another year remove the remainder of the troops. The timetable is certainly agonizingly slow, but it is a small step in the right direction. However, this proposal highlights a forgotten problem that both Republicans and Democrats overlook. America currently has troops in 136 countries. Apart from being morally presumptuous, these policies are responsible for growing the national debt to unprecedented levels.
The real problem is with American policy making. Our government assumes it knows what is best for people. Whether it is abroad or at home, it often enforces policies that control people’s lives, and this approach is what lands the U.S. military in so many places. What business does the U.S. military have in Greece or Switzerland? Is it not enough for government officials to assume they know what is best for us without them taking their agenda abroad?
At home, this philosophy manifests itself in things like taxes on tobacco or alcohol. The government tries to control your purchases with its policies. In turn, it thinks it know what is best for people in other countries as well.
These operations also cost money, but the government has no incentive to be frugal. It would only be logical to believe if Obama planned on increasing spending domestically, he would in turn need to cut spending abroad (not to mention his foreign policy platform led me to believe he would not tend toward interventionism). Thus far, this has not been the case. Bush and Obama alike seem to be perfectly content passing on foreign entanglements, out of control debt and inflation to future presidents.
During election season, we are led to believe one candidate is a war hawk and the other is all about peace. This is not the case. When 136 countries have American troops, we should be trying to reduce this number to something more acceptable like zero.
It is a good example of a political system which offers very little difference in choices across political parties. Either way you vote, the government will be very involved in your life and the lives of many others across the world.
The founding fathers warned against entangling alliances and even against having a standing army at all. Now, being stationed all over the world seems like second nature. I don’t see how interventionism to such a degree can be good for anything except for wasting time and resources. Almost half of America’s tax dollars go toward so-called defense spending, but the problem is we are not really defending anything at all. Political buzzwords like defense spending just disguise how ridiculous our foreign policy is.
Regardless of whether you agree with these policies in theory or not, the fact remains the country cannot afford such an aggressive foreign policy for much longer. It is time to start removing our presence abroad from countries in which we have long been too involved. This is not diplomacy. Americans are paying billions of tax dollars to the government so they can maintain an empire. Obama ran on a platform to promote peace, and a good way to achieve that is by drawing troops out of the unnecessary places we have them.
Derrick Godfrey is a junior majoring in economics. He can be contacted at [email protected].