Calling Out Libertarians on Foreign Policy

We should all strive to express ourselves as precisely as possible, terms such as "drop", "conceded" and "agreeing" should not be used interchangeably. My opponent goes a long way trying to excuse, argue and explain our past foreign policy and its benefits. In the case of the economic meaning of non-interventionism regarding Ron Paul's policy, he is just plain wrong. Ron Paul advocates free trade with all countries, his non-interventionism is limited to war and political intervention in other nations. [1] My opponent tries to use several phenomena in 1) and 2), such as globalization, to excuse our interventionist foreign policy, and uses a very stiff definition of consequentialism to aid to his conclusions. The key to this debate is simple: What is in the best interest of the United States? My opponent tries to explain how much interventionism benefits the US, and tries to articulate complex geopolitical situations such as the decision calculus of other nations (IIa) or the root causes of our interventionist foreign policy. The truth is that the global situation is not as simple as my opponent would like it to be. I have listed several cases in which our intervention in foreign affairs has come back and damaged us. My opponent of course ignores all those examples and has plenty of excuses for each and every single case. In C2 he lists some reasons on why we should intervene, and writes "withdrawal from Afghnistan will spark another civil war and as Taliban and Al Qaeda resurgence", "Non-intervention with Pakistan pushes it over the instability brink" and "Iran. Withdrawing throws the balance in the Middle East off. This will spur arms proliferation between Iran and Saudi Arabia"Of course my opponent again fails to recognize how many of the problems that we face today are self-inflicted and the direct consequence of our past mingling in other countries' affairs. It is not our job to policing the world or to spread democracy with bombs. My opponent has not acknowledged the side effects of our interventions abroad and his only answers to the raising problem is just more intervention. Meanwhile our popularity abroad is in free fall and we end up looking like the occupiers in many countries. My opponent has also ignored the cost of our foreign policy. A third of our annual budget goes on what is called "defense". We are spending an incredible amount of money trying to fight an invisible enemy. The idea that non-interventionism means lowering our guard is false. We still need to be able to defend ourselves, and Ron Paul has voted for the use of force in capturing or killing the people responsible for 9-11. Instead of doing just that though we went and overthrew a government we didn't like and tried to build a political system that the people in Afghanistan don't even want. Non interventionism also does not mean letting terrorists run amok, we still need to use the intelligence services to find out if there are any threats and then use not only the f-16s, but also diplomacy to work with other countries in trying to defeat this global problem. All of my opponent's arguments are based on the assumption that we will able to fight asymmetrical wars indefinitely and that it is in our national interest to be in a perpetual state of war. He tries to find an upside and an excuse for every single war that we fought and does not once during this entire debate acknowledge the human and monetary cost of our aggression wars abroad as well as the direct side effects of our policies. My opponent also seems to confuse non-interventionism with blind pacifism, which is of course a huge fallacy. The government is responsible for the common defense, not for trying to establish a global police force. This country was founded as a Republic, not an Empire. It is in our interest to use war only as an instrument of self-defense, and not to achieve our goals or political ambitions on the world's stage. Assuming a Libertarian Foreign Policy as expressed by Ron Paul would be first and foremost beneficial to the People of the United States of America! VOTE PRO! [1]. http://www.ontheissues.org...;