You need to read up on it. If you're not familiar with Generalplan Ost (which essentially means "Master Plan for the East"), it's difficult to know the real cause of WWII in Europe. Americans have an extremely Western-centric understanding of the war. The reality is that Hitler's real agenda wasn't defeating France or the UK. He did want to recover the Alsace-Lorraine region from France and wanted to keep them from interfering in his conquests, but the big agenda was a massive expansion of Germany to the East and not just to put Eastern Europe under German control but to ethnically and culturally transform them into German territory. That's what made their agenda more destructive than the Soviet Union's.
You are correct. It's as old as the Republic, and at one time, I might have agreed with it.
That's because we're mostly run by elected officials. Every government action has to have a convincing narrative whether it's war, domestic programs, etc. People aren't going to back a war for shits and giggles.
You're correct. However, the reason why the advocates for restraint, isolationism, or whatever we're calling it aren't able to prevent military engagements as much now is that they were discredited with WWII. The world was changing whether we liked it or not, and sitting on the sidelines got us two big things. First, it gave Germany a lot of time to build its military from a light defensive force into a menacing giant in violation of previous treaties. Second, it gave them massive conquests to the East and the West which made dealing with the problem infinitely harder than it needed to be.
I'm not a fan of the Treaty of Versailles, but once it was signed, the Allies looked ridiculous letting some Austrian corporal with a bad mustache wipe his *** with it. Suppose we had left a permanent, forward deployed force of troops in Europe after WWI (as we did after WWII). We could have stopped Nazi Germany once they violated the Treaty by remilitarizing the Rhineland. It literally would have saved tens of millions of lives and prevented the Holocaust, and it would have been a cakewalk compared to what we ultimately had to do.
Of course, we did learn our lesson after WWII. That's why the post WWII-Germany was a hell of a lot easier to deal with than the post WWI-Germany. It's also why their economy didn't turn to crap.
But there probably wouldn't be fewer dead Americans. The root problem with the libertarian or non-engagement view is that it looks at the world as it is today in a vacuum. It assumes that without US involvement, other nations would basically behave as they do now. A few bad apples like Iran and North Korea would occasionally talk some ****, but they ultimately wouldn't do anything. Nobody would care about conquest, etc. They'd have disagreements, but they wouldn't go fight and kill very much to pursue their goals. That's just absurd. It goes against human nature and all of human existence and history.
If the US disengaged or unilaterally weakened its position, other nations would fill the void. Furthermore, it wouldn't take long before some of them used their strength to interfere with the United States and its interests. We might delay some conflicts here and there, but the endpoint would be much bigger and nastier wars (like WWII).
This doesn't mean that no individual decision of the United States can be criticized on the merits. There's no question that we've gotten some of our moves wrong. However, the general policy of engagement and keeping ourselves in a position of overwhelming military power (whether used or not) has been good for us economically and in terms of security.
There's a bit of hyperbole here. You make it sound like we've got millions of troops occupying the globe. We don't. We've got about 190,000 troops stationed outside the United States as of 2017. It's one of the smallest forces we've had since WWII. Having said that, can we hit anybody in the world with our military? Yes. We have ICBM in the ground, ballistic missile submarines, and B-52s with very long range. They all carry nukes and can reach anybody, so in that sense, we can project power worldwide. How would it benefit the United States to diminish that to an arbitrary marking such as the Atlantic Ocean or Hawaii? Would some feel "less threatened" by us? Sure. Is that a good thing? I guess it depends who feels less threatened and what they want.
For example, do we want the Islamic world to feel "less threatened" by the US? Well, if they truly just wanted to live in peace in their own part of the world, I suppose that would be nice. The problem is that for that to be the case, Muslims would have to approach the world differently than they ever have. Since the time of Muhammad, it has been a religion centered heavily on conquest. If we left the Middle East alone, it's very unlikely that they'd just mellow out and live in peace, and it would be dangerous as hell to test that theory. It's a tough sell to convince people to do that just so that we can make some people feel less threatened.
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Last edited: Jun 10, 2019