Roger Simon needs to stop worrying about other men’s pants and start looking at the consequences of the idiot interventionist and immigrationist policies he has advocated in the past:
In other words, it’s time for libertarians to put on their big boy pants and give some serious thought not just to national defense but to global defense, because I have some news for them: The Pax Americana was the real deal. It worked for decades, saving myriad lives, and now it’s almost gone. We have seen that writ large for us in the last few years as never before. Obama’s non-existent, feckless, reactionary, confused, absurd (or whatever other adjective you want to pick) “leading from behind” foreign policy has brought the world to the brink of madness as nothing since WWII.
These days the man carrying the libertarian mantle most prominently — Senator Rand Paul — is off curing Guatemalans of eye disease. Laudable an enterprise as that is, I am less interested in what Paul can do for a few indigent Guatemalans as I am how he would respond to that other ophthalmologist/politician Bashir Assad. And not just Assad, of course, all of them.
It’s not enough to say we would respond as necessary. We live in a peanut-sized globe. What happens in Singapore redounds in San Diego and so forth. Paul has been a captivating candidate so far with some original ideas and approaches, but given the way the world is headed he is going to have to pull on his big boy pants and start articulating how he will deal with this escalating era of jihad.
And as for those libertarians who still prefer an isolationist approach, I can first remind them of Reagan’s advice about the necessity of a strong defense in order to have peace. If they don’t believe that, then I can promise them they will meet head on the famous prophecy of that same Comrade Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Simon doesn’t stop to think that the reason the USA is in such a parlous state is the direct result of a) American military interventions, and b) America’s quasi-open immigration policies. It’s always interesting to see naive commentators ignorant of basic military history babbling about war, because the Clausewitzian center of gravity is NOT in the Middle East, Syria, or even Iraq. It is in the West. The war in the East cannot be seriously fought until the war in the West is won; contra the insistence of the WWI-era generals, offense is not the way to win a war.
UPDATE: To say nothing of the fact that this is the same guy who wanted the USA to remove Assad from power last year, which would have assured that ISIS was even better established in the region than it is now.