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Feral Finster's avatar

America needs a Big Bad Scary-Looking Enemy, as a justification for astronomical military and security budgets, to provide a pretext for the destruction of civil liberties, and to forestall calls for reform.

"Sure, education, healthcare and infrastructure would be great, but don't you know, there's a war on? We gotta fight Saddam/Milosevic/Noriega/Putin/Saddam again/Xi/Whatever!"

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Jeffrey Harrison's avatar

Nice write up, Mr. Cardin. It's good to see some discussion of alternatives to our current behavior. That said, I think you have some opportunities for improvement here. I'm going to borrow some of the concepts from the late, great, humorist, Sir Terry Prachett. He spent a chunk of one of his diskworld novels exploring some related but actually different concepts. For example, as he pointed out being sober isn't the opposite of being drunk, it's the absence of being drunk. He defines the opposite of being drunk as a hyper realistic state that he called knurled. He then goes on to have fun with that word.

Which brings us to.... isolationism which is defined (in the dictionary) as an unwillingness to engage with the world is the opposite of interventionism. An actual isolationist wouldn't, for example, be a member of the UN, agree to a trade treaty, or sign on to a treaty on the law of the seas. The only isolationist that I can think of is North Korea. Interventionism which is the opposite of isolationism is problematic since any nation can be an interventionist, all you need to to be powerful enough to beat up anybody who would have the temerity to object to your intervening. There's another name for this - it's called the law of the jungle. The UN was supposed to put a stop to that but since the US was the first and the biggest and baddest interventionist who views rules as quaint things that only little countries follow.

Then you have the Chinese or the spirit of "nonconflict, nonconfrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation." As I believe Zhou En Lai put it. That, I think, is the opposite of isolationism and interventionism. We might want to give it a shot.

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