The price of intervention
Doug Bandow, a former Reagan administration official, on the consequences of American foreign policy: Terrorism cannot be treated in isolation from American foreign policy. It’s not that Americans deserved to die, that the blame falls on U.S. policymakers instead of the killers who hijacked and crashed four planes. Rather, terrorism must be understood as an inevitable consequence of global intervention.
Doug Bandow’s position is that other nations ought to set American foreign policy. He describes terrorism as a tool of weak nations, and believes that the US is provoking attacks against itself by taking positions that are contrary to the interests of terror-sponsoring countries. The problem with this approach is that it is an invitation for our enemies to attack us by sponsoring terror groups in order to separate us from our allies.
Doug Bandow’s approach is pretty radical - the American way has always been to respect those who respect us and punish those who attack us. He is proposing that the US abandon its allies to appease its enemies. It is the Cato Institute’s (Bandow’s think tank) penny-wise, pound-foolish approach that has led to China’s ever-expanding push into the South China Sea (through the American abandonment of the Filipino bases in the early 1990’s) and the extinction of the only Christian government in the Arab world in Lebanon. The Cato Institute is misnamed - it wants to bury its head in the sand about the danger from abroad, whereas Cato the Elder pushed for the destruction of Rome’s enemies, the most famous example of which was the leveling of Carthage.
It is time that the US made clear to foreign countries that either directly or indirectly kill Americans that there is a price to be paid for their hostile foreign policy vis-a-vis the US and its allies. This is the point we have attempted to drive home to our enemies via the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is time for them to appease us, and not the other way around.
-- Zhang Fei