John Kerry and the “New Isolationism”

by Gerard Emershaw

Secretary of State John Kerry has come a long way from his days of being a heroic and decorated war hero critic of the Vietnam War. Perhaps war is only bad when it affects him and his generation as Vietnam did. Kerry criticized what he calls the “new isolationism.” Obviously referring to the unwillingness of Congress and the American people to support military intervention on behalf of Al Qaeda in Syria, Kerry said: “We are beginning to behave like a poor nation.”

According to Kerry, it is poor nations which are non-interventionist? So the Founders, who loathed the very idea of foreign military entanglements, wished the Republic to be a poor nation? If nonintervention is how poor nations act, how is it that while the United States pursued a mostly non-interventionist policy during the 19^th century, it rose from an agrarian former British colony to the dominant world economic power? Was the United States prior to the unnecessary Spanish–American War a poor nation?

Among the wealthiest nations are Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, the Netherlands, and Sweden. These nations are anything but bellicose. None of these nations warmonger. None of these nations have pursued interventionist foreign policies. So that must mean that they are “poor nations.” Or perhaps History and Economics were not his strong suit at Yale.

One way that a nation can become poor is through war. Look no further than what World War I did to Germany. Look no further what the Orwellian continuous wars that the United States is waging around the globe are doing to the American economy. Or how these wars have caused the national debt to skyrocket to unsustainable levels.

Americans are becoming disenchanted with President Obama’s Orwellian war state, and inaccurate passive aggressive insults of the American people by members of his administration are not going to change this fact.