[Just finished this. It's too long for the character limit. The last bit of it I will put in a comment underneath.] I write this essay to carry the burden of summarizing, all too briefly for the topic, certain aspects of U.S. history and political reality and as a prologue to another, second essay on whom I will vote for for president this year, an essay which doesn't need to be lengthened with this explanation but does need to be strengthened by it. **The “Worth It” School of American Foreign Policy** “The Congress shall have Power... To declare War” -- from the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8 The political history of the United States has involved the evolution of the conceptions of what constitutes “war,” “declaration,” “defense,” “armies,” “conflict,” “combat,” and even “combatants.” Even “victory.” Some of these changes have been merely the result of the changes in our world, particularly technologically, in the past two and a half centuries. Most have been the slow degradation of the express intentions of the Constitution and the slow expansion of government power, ever more outside the restrictions of the chains of the Constitution. In conjunction with the rise of the Progressive movement in the United States at the end of the Nineteenth Century came an impulse to project American values and the will of the U.S. government on other powers and peoples in other places. The mania for this broke out in full fever in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Directly following that war in 1899 was the Philippine-American War, a military action marked at times by such pointless suppression of sometimes primitively-armed natives of those far Pacific islands that Mark Twain, initially an explicit supporter of “American imperialism” and the Spanish-American War, wrote concerning Theodore Roosevelt's congratulatory note to the commander of one incident, the Moro Crater Massacre: “His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines—that is to say, they had dishonored it.” It seems these initial forays into the art of projecting American might into far away places for the sake merely of adventure, honor, and power left enough of a sour taste in the mouths of the American public to put this desire on a low simmer going into the Twentieth Century. No one after those wars can, in American politics, say, “There is no threat to American lives or interests there, but we want to go in with the military and spread Democracy,” and be given a hearing. After those wars, Americans needed much more in at least the appearance of *reasons* before politically consenting to foreign engagements. The major wars and conflicts of the Twentieth Century can at least be said to have invovled actual dangers and actual foreign enemies, even presenting actual threats at least to American allies. Whether American involvment was warranted is still in many cases highly questionable. Trying to find a great moral cause in the Great War is an empty endeavor, for instance. One of the very, very negative precedents here, setting the stage for its later continued abuse, is the lack of formal declarations of war by Congress. None of our wars in the Twentieth Century after the Second World War were declared by Congress. The effect of this is the concentration of the entire decision-making process of going into conflict into the discretion and power of the president and the executive branch. Increasingly, one man can have his war and tell Congress about it later, removing the aspect of deliberation and of accountability to the people who have to pay for the war and fight it. It can always come out later that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated, and no one even loses a job, let alone faces prison time. Or charges of high crimes and misdemeanors. In that time, though, Soviet power did at least constitute a long-term and civilization-level threat. I disagree with our involvement in particular wars, but Soviet political doctrine *was* the destruction of free nations and the assimilation of humanity into their collective. Even I maintain that *some* response was in order, even if it was mainly preparation and readiness. Choices made in countering the Soviets and in the shape of our strategy and response brought us into involvment in finer and finer details of the goings-on in other places in the world and in other relationships to which we were not party. It seemed wise to counter Soviet influence in every way, down to the smallest tit-for-tat conflict or rivalry between otherwise irrelevant local powers. The internal politics of other nations came to be often polarized by a U.S.-Soviet axis. All relationships and all information were things to be made use of to the maximum extent possible. Like the emergence of the mafia in response to the realities of Prohibition, these things led to the development of new skills and new disciplines, the crafting of terrible new powers to interfere and manipulate. If you're not familiar, look up Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Iran, 1953, Operation Ajax. And if what you find shocks you, look further. Eisenhower felt burned by what they put over on him. I think this is a big thing behind his famous farewell speech. If an expansion of foreign policy objectives had been all, it might still not have amounted to much, besides perhaps Constitutional overreach. But with the growth of the reasons to be involved with every situation and every conflict in every part of the globe came the growth of a professional apparatus of unofficial and covert agency, of the means to project influence and exert power on a continuum from soft to hard, and of the management and manipulation of human beings to achieve ends. Growing in the finesse of this new discipline and gaining through practice its requisite expertises increased, necessarily, the power potentially to be exercised in all affairs, foreign or domestic. And every fulfillment of the need for the power to monitor or investigate those among us from outside who might be here to do us harm yielded simultaneously the means to do the same with law-abiding citizens. Every part of this is a double-edged sword. It needs more than this small essay. It needs a very large book to recount how the expansion of state power in foreign policy matters fed and reinforced and accelerated the expansion of state domestic power and the curtailment of Constitutional liberties. The growth of our federal government has been measurable, almost, in departments added administration by administration, some by mere executive decree. These departments over time have been given the power to write binding federal legislation into the Federal Register, and even to try and to punish violations of the administrative code. Legal scholar Harold Berman has already warned us of the fundamental shift in his *Law and Revolution* in 1983. We have lived through an overturning of the foundations of the Western legal tradition, and hardly anyone is aware of it. There is an entire history of the “conservative movement,” which emerged in the 1950s, and its relation to the question of state power, a thing this movement tended to oppose, in the context of the fight against International Communism, a fight it supported. The school of thought which came to dominate and to represent “conservatism” to most people, a school itself represented in the person of Bill Buckley, was the belief that increased state power, though bad in principle, was necessitated by the conflict with the Soviets and that we could always take those powers away from government when the Soviet threat was no more. But none of these people, including Bill Buckley, made any gestures toward recinding the powers or the budgets of departments of the United States government when the Soviet Union went defunct in 1991! Since the “liberals” (so-called) in the Twentieth Century were for increased state power, that made agreement enough between the two sides. “Conservatism” has been largely “liberalism's” shadow for its entire modern history. It would lengthen this essay even further to delve aside into the faults and far-ranging consequences of U.S. foreign policy in the Soviet era. Even trying to accomplish something as good as driving Soviet occupiers out of Afghanistan in the Eighties gave rise to the Taliban and to Al-Qaeda. If you haven't seen the movie *Charlie Wilson's War*, you need to see *Charlie Wilson's War*. Every weapon and every technology given to others and every technique or strategy taught to others can come back to be used against us. Sometimes it takes decades. And it can take decades for a work of tactical genius to come back to haunt us as a great folly. After the fall of the Soviet Union, now adrift from the organizing principle of opposing and containing the Soviets, the American foreign policy establishment could only fall back on its oldest impulse -- that of reshaping the world in their own image. The first murmurs were actions taken in the Nineties. The business really got going in the Aughts, with a war still going today that started nineteen years ago, with some soldiers there now who were not even born yet when the war started. I believe that if we are going to ask American soldiers to take on the risks of injury and death, not only that “the cause must be just” (which feels so cliché to even say today) but that the cause must be *necessary*, that is, it must be addressed to an actual risk of American life and security. What we have now, and have had for a long time, is a foreign policy that uses American forces (meaning, ultimately, American bodies and lives) as pieces in an elaborate, rarefied chess game of foreign influence and strategic relationships. It is one thing to demand that the Afghan government give up Osama bin Laden after he directed major terror attacks on this country. This is analogous to tracking down and punishing a murderer in the realm of domestic law. It doesn't bring back the dead. That's not why we do it. It does put a price on committing murder, which is all the law can do. It is another to still be there nineteen years later trying to fix Afghan political and social ills -- or Iraqi, or those of any other foreign culture. We have violated our duty as a country to ask only what is necessary of those who have put their lives at our disposal. While the premium put on the sacrifice of American lives and bodies has been reduced smaller and smaller, the range of means considered acceptible to accomplish whatever end, great or small, has grown larger and larger. More and more has been swept into the category of “collateral damage.” Or into the category of “enemy combatant.” It was uncovered in 2012 that for purposes of defining “enemy combatant,” any male of military age could be counted, barring only explicit posthumous intelligence proving that he wasn't. Even one sixteen-year-old U.S. citizen in 2011 wasn't counting as having the Constitutional right of being innocent until proven guilty. He had “the wrong father,” we were told. And the reward for all of the moral lines crossed and all the human costs paid has not been any support of stability and peace in any part of this world. We have, at this price, wrecked entire regions of the globe, displaced peoples and ethnic groups, and fertilized horrors and tyrannies worse than those we displaced. Ghadaffi was a bad man. He did cruel things to other human beings and mistreated people in his own country, Libya. No one wants another Ghadaffi. But what did we get from supporting and enabling his overthrow? Chaos and bloodshed. we got the emergence *in the open* of the *above ground* market for human slaves. The gift of the U.S. government to North Africa. The work of the policy geniuses. I am searching for the antonym to “the Midas touch.” Right now, there is a migrant crisis in Europe of people streaming away from the war-torn Middle East. How to deal with this is now a political crisis of its own in European countries. Some see a crisis of violence in the migrant communities. Some see a political crisis in the response of the Europeans to the migrants. This gift of crisis and instability comes to Europe with our name on the label. U.S. foreign policy did this. And U.S. taxpayers footed the bill for the party and is providing the drinks. At its core, our foreign policy has been animated by a philosophy epitomized by a few lines from an interview in 1996, which will forever encapsulate the deepest mindset of our corps of diplomats and planners, intelligence and strategists. Lesley Stahl interviewed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and, concerning the effects of the U.S. sanctions on Iraq at that time asked, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Madeleine Albright's reply: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” It's all “worth it.” It always has been “worth it” and always will be “worth it.” When did these people ever decide after the fact that something they did was *not* worth it? There is a political and economic class to which belong those who profit from the overuse and abuse of the American military, both people who profit from contracts and orders and supply hardware and support, and people who do other business with those who fulfill those contracts. Eisenhower warned us of this much, much earlier in the process. It can be, even has to be, the same people and corporations who do the service of providing the goods for actual defense and readiness. Only, it is always better to be able to sell more of even the same things. It will always be good business to support the next involvement or intervention. Lobbyist and Congressional reelection committees will always find that those in favor of intervention have more money to pay than those opposed. What corporation is ever paid not to supply something? Who ever profits from peace? And water runs downhill. [CONTINUED IN COMMENT]