Merry Christmas from Uncle Pat

[Karpatsky]

The world is a smaller place than it used to be, and much more interconnected. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum feel free to criticize the 'liberal world order' but don't hesitate to take advantage of its boons in the form of a higher standard of living. People underestimate the value of it because Western policy in recent years has (wisely) been to attempt to nip potential threats to it in the bud rather than waiting for a real crisis, which admittedly has in recent years led to overreactions and poor decisions. But it is not possible anymore, as it was in the past, for America to hide behind its oceans without severe economic consequences in the long run.

But beyond the economic argument, don't you all think it is time to stop pretending that our moral obligation to each other as people ends at a arbitrary border or ocean? What is the moral difference between the Kurds (or the Ukrainians, or Estonians) as opposed to Floridians or Hawaiians that make the freedom of the latter worth my and my kin's blood but not the former? Believe it or not, my hometown is closer to Tallinn than it is to Pearl Harbor, and my great-grandfather, who died for the latter, was born closer to Kurdistan than to what would become his. Nationalist isolationism is a weak enough moral code on its own, and only more so in a multi-ethnic society like the United States. Pragmatic restraints are necessary at times, but to believe that those born beyond a border do not deserve even a moral consideration is ignorant at best and inhuman at worst.

[Karpatsky]

The world is a smaller place than it used to be, and much more interconnected. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum feel free to criticize the 'liberal world order' but don't hesitate to take advantage of its boons in the form of a higher standard of living. People underestimate the value of it because Western policy in recent years has (wisely) been to attempt to nip potential threats to it in the bud rather than waiting for a real crisis, which admittedly has in recent years led to overreactions and poor decisions. But it is not possible anymore, as it was in the past, for America to hide behind its oceans without severe economic consequences in the long run.

But beyond the economic argument, don't you all think it is time to stop pretending that our moral obligation to each other as people ends at a arbitrary border or ocean? What is the moral difference between the Kurds (or the Ukrainians, or Estonians) as opposed to Floridians or Hawaiians that make the freedom of the latter worth my and my kin's blood but not the former? Believe it or not, my hometown is closer to Tallinn than it is to Pearl Harbor, and my great-grandfather, who died for the latter, was born closer to Kurdistan than to what would become his. Nationalist isolationism is a weak enough moral code on its own, and only more so in a multi-ethnic society like the United States. Pragmatic restraints are necessary at times, but to believe that those born beyond a border do not deserve even a moral consideration is ignorant at best and inhuman at worst.

This.

Where does the foreign intervention stop?

At what point do we NOT intervene?

1) I’d argue history has proven Jefferson wrong on that issue and 2) Rightly or wrongly, we already intervened in Syria and now that we’re already there and our continued presence is the only thing preventing a genocide, we have a moral responsibility to stay.

Assuming that I buy into the highlighted portion (which I'm open to considering, given that we have already intervened there), where does it stop?

In addition, if this is true, than isn't the entire Iraq War defensible?  After all, Saddam Hussein had CHILDREN in prisons.  This was an atrocity, and a verified one; were we not justified to remove him from power to liberate those children?

If you're right, you, me, and the bulk of Atlas owe an apology to Dick Cheney George W. Bush, the Vice President who ordered all of that.  It also begs the question of whether America IS the "Genocide Police" of the World.  Perhaps we are, and/or perhaps we should be, but there are implications to that as well.

It is not possible to fulfill either part of Jefferson's quote without being willing to reach out to help others - in other words, the problem is with his 18th century definition of 'our', because it is the nature of autocracy to expand wherever it can. When Jefferson lived and for almost a near century afterwards, the United States did not have to play 'world police' because Britain took up that burden of preventing an autocratic state from gaining world power. Immediately when Britain's strength began to fade, the United States saw negative consequences in the form of disruption of trade, and Wilson (wisely) brought the United States out of its blinders to face the real world. But his successors , thinking like Jefferson, put them back on and in so doing allowed the Second World War to happen, resulting in severe costs for America.

It's easy to criticize interventionism in hindsight, but only because it is impossible to know what costs might have been necessary to right the potential consequences of inaction in (say) Greece, Turkey, or Korea. 'Failures' in intervention (which are impossible to positively identify because we can't know the consequences of not intervening) in my subjective view are usually the result of bad leadership choosing the wrong timing or the wrong side. Iraq was an evident threat to the world order in 1991, and the first Gulf War was unquestionably the correct thing to do both from a geopolitical and a moral standpoint. The problem with the Second Gulf War is that the second Bush administration decided too late that they wanted to 'finish the job' and so completely fabricated a reason to go back in, which did not hold up to scrutiny anywhere and so did not provide it with the moral legitimacy it needed to succeed.

To answer your last question, while I think there is a moral obligation to go in 'everywhere', we have to recognize just as in other areas that there are material constraints to our ability to help others. You and I don't have the money or the time to individually right the moral wrongs of our world, but we try to maximize our impact of good on the world through prudent charity and volunteering. The United States and the Western World must do the same on the world stage, which depends on principled and effective leadership. Buchanan's stance here is like to say - 'it's impossible to feed all the starving children in the world, so why waste money trying to feed even one?'