Calling Out Libertarians on Foreign Policy

Thank you for posting your arguments.My opponent opens the debate by mentioning non-interventionism and criticises it by writing "This assumption basically says that if X nation is non-interventionist, the relations towards it will be non-interventionist and non-protagonist as well."My opponent engages in a very detailed analysis that I consider without any doubt interesting, but decisively irrelevant. The assumption that a non-interventionist policy's goal is to have other countries being non-interventionist towards us is false.Ron Paul, as well as many other libertarians believe that we should hold a non-interventionist foreign policy because it is in our national interest not to get tangled into problems that do not concern us.Non-interventionism also does not mean pacifism. Ron Paul and the libertarian movement do realize that we as a nation do have a right to self-defense, however our current foreign policy is not based on self-defense anymore. We have troops stationed around the world not to defend ourselves but to defend other countries, including Germany, Italy, Turkey, Iraq and South Korea. There is no clear threat to the United States coming from the countries that neighbor those nation. Troops in West Europe are a relict of the Cold War and are there for no good apparent reason. There is no threat to the US coming from Russia, and we are providing unnecessary defense to West European States that is paid for by the US Taxpayer.In his second point my opponent claims that the assumption that the problems that we face now are caused by our past interventionist policies is false. I strongly disagree with this claim. We have a long history of intervening in foreign affairs, and more often than not we are unable to foresee the consequences of our actions. I would like to list a few examples of people that we have helped in the past who then became a problem for us:Osama Bin LadenGot trained, aid and weapons from the CIA to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union collapsed, he turned his weapons on us. More than 3,000 people died in the 9 11 attacks.Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein was supported by the US, France and other European powers in fighting against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. After the War was over, he sent his troops into Kuwait. The US had to send troops to liberate Kuwait at the cost of over 60 Billion $ and almost 400 american lives. Having had US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia also enraged our old ally Osama Bin Laden who then attacked us ( see above ).Islamic Republic or Iran The current political leaders of Iran are among the biggest critics of US policy in the world and are arguably working on an atomic bomb. The question is, who is to blame for this hostility? The sad truth is that we are in part responsible for this regime being in power, since we aided the Shah of Persia to come to power as our ally, by staging a coup against a democratically elected leader. This of course enraged many extremist in the country who because of our intervention in their affairs were able to gain enough traction to eventually overthrow the Shah and install an Islamic Theocracy.There are more examples of how our foreign policy ended up hurting us in the long run, but I shall rest to these examples for now.My opponent argues that we should remain in Afghanistan, and that a withdraw of our troops is going to be dangerous.Ron Paul and other libertarians as myself believe that we cannot fight an independence war for every other country in the world. The Afghani people have their chance to decide what they want from their future. It is not up to us to impose a political system on them, or to resolve civil brawls. We have seen after a ten year war, that Karzai is now probably going to turn his back on us and make his peace with the taliban anyway. [1]We has spent billions of dollars and lost hundreds of soldiers in this war and are still not able to bring peace to this region.It should not be our job to do nation building around the globe and spreading democracy by force.My opponent also argues that we have vital interests in Pakistan and that "it is in our interest to aid the Pakistani because to help counter terrorism in the Pakistani region and (2) be stabilized so its nuclear arsenal would not become an open target for terrorist groups."This point is of cause not as easy as my opponent would like it to be. The truth is that we don't know who we can and who we cannot trust in Pakistan and we should therefore keep ourselves out of it. There is good reason to believe that Osama Bin Laden escaped years ago at Tora Bora because he got tipped off by official within the Pakistani government, which is by the way the reason why the Obama administration kept the raid on Bin Laden's secret and did not share information with the Pakistani government out of fear it would leak again.It is reasonable to think that our intervention in Pakistani affairs might have consequences that we cannot foresee.The most sensitive point is of course Iran. I myself believe that Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. However there has been mongering and talks about the imminent threat of Iranian nuclear weapons for almost ten years now, and nothing has materialized. The best way to fight the radical regime in Tehran is by letting it implode. If we keep intervening in foreign affairs, especially around the middle east, we will just play into the Iranian's government rhetoric and help them consolidate their power.The only people who can help the Iranians are the Iranians themselves! We have already seen riots and protests in Iran several months ago and there is a good chance that the so-called arab spring might spread further east. Intervention in Iran would only make it harder for us to see the theocratic government gone.We have armed Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan before, we are arming Saudi Arabia now, and the conflicts and alliances keep shifting. Instead of trying to balance the power by selling them weapons that are then used against us, we should just have them deal with their own problems. It is not in our national interest to defend either of those states.The only nation in the middle east that has proved to be a trusted ally in the middle east, Israel, is well capable of defending itself, and would have already bombed Iran if it believed they were close to manufacturing a nuclear weapon.History has shown again and again that our foreign intervention policy more often than not comes back and bites us in the posterior. Policing the world is not in our national interest. It is time that we bring the troops home and start focusing our energy here, and only go to war with a declaration of war, as provided by the US constitution.[1] http://www.english.rfi.fr...;