This action-reaction lesson is a key part of a youngster's practical education, and in the course of his or her pre-college schooling the Schoolyard Rule is reinforced by courses in subjects like history, physics, religion, and chemistry. At high school graduation, most American teenagers have a handle on the idea that if you push, you will be pushed back, and are confident that this is an iron law. When was the last time you met a schoolyard Gandhi?
But then comes college. The unfortunates who trundle off to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere in the Ivy League are cleansed of the Schoolyard Rule's common sense, emerging four years later with few contact points with reality. They have learned to shape policies for the world they want, not the one on offer. They believe it their duty to use whatever tool available, be it laws, bayonets, or cruise missiles, to turn the world's people into semi-socialist, spendthrift, ahistoric, anti-religious democrats -- in short, mirror images of themselves.
These Ivy League graduates who have forgotten the Schoolyard Rule now dominate U.S. foreign policy. Eager to push hard any person or state they disagree with or dislike, they blithely assume the pushed will know such punishment is indispensable in becoming as smart, cool, and sophisticated as people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.
Nearly alone among Republicans and Democrats, Paul knows that ignoring the Schoolyard Rule, its corollary, and the founders' warning against nonessential intervention in foreigners' affairs would be ruinous for America. As president, Paul would push only if a genuine U.S. national security interest were at stake. Wars would be fought only over life-and-death matters -- like access to energy and freedom of the seas -- and not over ephemera like Israel's interests and women's rights and human rights overseas.
Paul would listen to the enemy. Not to empathize or sympathize, but to understand his motivation and form policy to defeat him, ensuring the motivation of today's enemies is not passed to the next generation. The failure of both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama to understand that it is U.S. government actions in the Islamic world that fire Islamist motivation, not hatred of freedom or how Americans live at home, proves that only Paul's approach can restore U.S. security. The Islamists have educated Americans just as clearly and openly as Ho Chi Minh and General Giap did; the United States' failure of perception has already ensured that much of the next generation of young Muslims will become Islamists.
A Ron Paul presidency would reverse a half-century of Republican and Democratic leaders maintaining national security policies that lethally push Muslims, premised on the delusion they will not push back. President Paul would replace the interventionism of these men and women -- who are merely miseducated, not evil -- with the founders' guidance, the Schoolyard Rule, and a belief that the federal government is an engine of national destruction and bankruptcy. For President Paul, the protection of the United States' genuine interests by avoiding unnecessary wars and frivolous interventions is first, last, and always the main foreign-policy priority of the U.S. government.
SUBJECTS:
