The Most Non-Interventionist Potential 2020 Candidate

[#gravelgang #lessiglad]

Among Dems, Murphy or Sanders.

Among Reps, Amash obviously.

[#gravelgang #lessiglad]

America and the world can't afford non-interventionism. America needs to be involved in the world for its own interests and the world's and stand up for freedom and democracy, Obama was too dovish a President(though at least better than Bush). Hillary Clinton's foreign policy was ideal, what America and the world need is smart power and responsible use of America's power.

Please name a US intervention in a foreign country since 1970 that was a success that greatly improved the situation in that country.

Hard mode: You can't say Kosovo

Heck, you'd be hard pressed to name a successful intervention since 1945.

[#gravelgang #lessiglad]

^ Right now is probably not the best time to say that Korea was a successful US intervention. Although relative to other adventures, it was probably less bad.

[#gravelgang #lessiglad]

It's a pretty big leap to take from "North Korea is bad and their regime is bad" to "any intervention was justified."

There are, of course, benefits (humanitarian, economic partnership, and strategic alliances with the South) and drawbacks (a hand in the creation of an oppressive, antagonistic regime with the 4th largest military in the world with no diplomatic relations, largely a result of intervention) to having intervened and the proper question to ask when drawing up a military option is will the region be unequivocally better off. Is the current option better than any possible combination of outcomes?

Sure, it's better today than if the North had defeated the South and had basically continued the same brutal regime regardless of intervention. But it becomes a much more complicated question if the North conquers the South, followed by the US exerts its wide array of soft power options on a nation not predisposed to hate us due to intervention. At that point, you weigh the marginal loss of freedom for citizens of the occupied South with the marginal increase of freedom for citizens of the North, with the loss of a vital trading and strategic partner, with the potential opening of a solidified, pseudo-communist Korea regime, with the potential for drastically lower levels of antagonism from a unified Korea. It's a much more difficult question to ask and it's precisely why I'm hesitant to declare the Korean intervention this unequivocal success.

It strikes me as short sighted at best to say, well we stopped the North so Mission Accomplished. The North is so aggressively antagonistic precisely because the United States intervened against them in the past and has done so repeatedly to other nations across the globe.

[#gravelgang #lessiglad]

Except a communist government can never result in a more free society than South Korea has right now .

I never said any of that. My claim is that a counterfactual in which the US did not aid the South would potentially result in more freedom for citizens of the North, not South.

the fact is the north had no right to invade the south and in reality if we stopped after taking the north's capital we would have had a feee and unified Korea today .

The problem with an intervention-based foreign policy is that these sort of moral judgments on "the right to invade" ring hollow for residents and leaders of other countries.