America Is Facing A Crisis
Once again, the nation is engaged in a fundamental debate about its future. What should we do with Medicare? How do we protect social security? How do we fix the tax structure? What should we do about energy? These are all important questions. However, none of them represent the most pressing, underlying problem facing the country. All of the debates around domestic issues are really irrelevant right now in my view. If we don't get the underlying problem fixed, we won't have much money for any of the domestic items that we need.
America’s gravest threat is not healthcare spending, social security, or energy. The national debt? That’s not it either. The debt problem is fixable, what is lacking is the political will to do it. America’s gravest threat is its own foreign policy. It is amazing that neither political party wants to discuss the elephant in the room. This is mainly because both parties are completely beholden to the industries involved…in this case, the defense industry.
Current American foreign policy, still largely built on the outdated 65 year old Truman Doctrine, is not in line with the realities of the present. The nation has a much leaner military, the largest total debt that it has ever seen, the biggest debt to GDP ratio since WWII, and it is still mired in an over decade long period of war that has cost taxpayers over $3 trillion - money that we will never get back. I am still wrapping my head around the fact that $3 trillion was wasted on two (unfunded) wars that were not worth it. Under a misguided Bush foreign policy, the U.S. tried to kill a fly by burning down the house. What was needed all along was a fly swatter -- good intelligence, human intelligence, allowing law enforcement to do its job, improving diplomatic relations and forming global partnerships, improving the nations image around the world, taking covert action, responsibly beefing up security where needed, use our economic power for positive change, changing foreign policy priorities to meet the realities of a new world, and only when necessary…use special operations forces. But trillions of dollars were wasted on failed adventures that left the Muslim world more radicalized than before. Never has more treasure been wasted to kill one man or even a ragtag group of men. Not to mention that the country is crawling back from the biggest economic collapse since The Great Depression. Yet the nation lacks a sensible, realistic foreign policy. In fact, the nation’s policymakers have pushed for more of the same.
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