originally posted by: Elvicious1
I'm hoping, through intelligent discourse, that the above question can be answered in a succinct and informative manner, without undue emotion.
Having said that I will provide specific questions:
1) Why must "we" be involved in other people's affairs in reference to World Events?
2) How is it necessary for us to care whether Russia invades Ukraine?
3) How is it necessary for us to care whether China invades Taiwan?
4) How is it necessary for the United States to become involved in any war that is not related to direct transgressions solely against the U.S.?
5) Why is it necessary for the United States to have open borders?
6) Why is it not more important and necessary to take care of yourself and your own before taking care of someone else in relation to the United
States' International Protocol?
7) Why does the United States Republic allow corrupt (every...single...one) politicians to speak for them when they don't have the general public's
welfare at heart, especially given the nature and speed of the Internet's ability to allow immediate, consensual response to World and National
Events?
Thank-you for your Time and Consideration,
Elvicious1.
With regard to questions 1 -4:
It is necessary to do those things because of the invention of jet aircraft, rockets, computers, and nuclear weapons, all of which were technological
developments of WWII.
Before 1942, many people in the US believed that the US didn’t need to and should not get involved in foreign affairs because we appeared to have
everything we needed already and we had two large oceans that separated us from potential enemies, and two friendly nations on our Northern and
Southern borders. Life was good and it was much simpler and happier to just not care about what was happening across the ocean and around the
world.
A few short years later, World War II changed all that. By the end of the war, it became apparent to US and allied decision makers that it was
entirely possible to construct weapons capable of eradicating entire cities and eventually entire nations in a single day. The US had the good
fortune to develop that capability first and used it to end the war decisively. However, it was also clear that other nations could and would develop
that capability eventually, as indeed they did. The Soviet Union was obviously the earliest and most aggressive example of this, eventually
stockpiling around 45,000 nuclear weapons at its peak. In a world with many nations possessing hundreds or thousands of weapons of mass destruction
each, the consequences of a direct war between nuclear armed hostile states could easily be half or more of the world’s population dead
overnight.
Realizing this, it became a central goal of the US to prevent World War III from ever happening. Obviously, the Soviet Union would be the first and
biggest challenge to this goal, primarily because the Soviet Union was openly and unapologetically aggressive in its hostility to what it saw as the
morally inferior western democracies and was enthusiastically expansionist in its foreign policy. So, the US task became preventing WW III between the
most heavily nuclear armed states while simultaneously preventing the Soviet Union from taking over the world. That was the premise of the Cold
War.
Basically, the US strategy for conducting the Cold War was a simple extension of WW II. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Dwight
Eisenhower’s book on his job as Supreme Allied Commander of the allied forces in WW II, titled “Crusade in Europe”. He credited the allied
victory in Europe to two factors. The first--which everyone knows about--was the astounding productive capacity of the US war industry and the
second—which most people don’t know about--was the fact that the allied forces were willing to pool their military efforts under the command of a
single, supreme commander, rather than pursuing their war aims independently. The US was the leader in that effort because the US was the only nation
that could do it, and all the allies accepted that fact.
The fact that that strategy had worked so well in WWII is what convinced all the like-minded nations that that was also probably the only way the Cold
War could be fought and won. Once again, it was widely recognized as a practical matter that the US was the only nation that COULD fill that function
by leading NATO. Similar treaty organizations were set up in other parts of the world such as the far east, southeast Asia, Australia, etc. Once
again, the US was the organizer and leader of those treaty organizations because we were the only ones who could do it. If we had not taken the
initiative in this way, there would have been no organized opposition to the Soviet Union’s expansionism. All the individual nations who were the
Soviet Union’s targets would have faced the Soviet Union individually and could have been picked off one at a time, pretty much the way Russia is
trying to pick off Ukraine today.
This is why the US must be involved in world events, why it’s necessary to care about Russia invading Ukraine and about China invading Taiwan. We
still want to prevent nuclear war while also wanting to prevent expansionist authoritarian nations from taking over the world, because our quality of
life would end up being much worse if we don’t. Maybe not immediately, but soon. We've been to this movie before and we know how it ends. And
we’re still the only ones who can lead that effort. If we don’t confront those expansionist nations today where they live, we will have to
confront them tomorrow, on our doorstep. As a strictly selfish proposition, it is much cheaper and more effective to do that today rather than
tomorrow.
Many people in the US long for the simpler, happier days, when we could ignore everything that wasn’t happening strictly inside our borders, but
those days have been gone for 80 years and are not coming back. Our very survival depends on a reasonably functioning international order. It is an
attractive fantasy but a dangerous fantasy nevertheless to believe that we can go back to the good old days and thereby improve our quality of life.
The world is now too small and too interconnected to not care about these things.
IMHO