What should our basic foreign policy position be for the 2016 campaign?

[Ken Burch]

0 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	The status quo
	0 (0%)
	peace, more openness to standing with the world's poor and dispossed, anti-austerity.
	0 (0%)
	Further right...we should out-kill the rightists
	0 (0%)
	We shouldn't have a foreign policy...we should just abolish the world-it takes up too much space
	0 (0%)
	other
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	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
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[Chan790]

1. More isolationist, more communalist, but not pacifist.

There are and will continue to be a number of foreign policy issues where our allies like France, Germany and the UK know they can be hands-off and avoid conflict with their own anti-war lefts at home without any loss of benefit to their interests because they know the US will act if they do not.

It's time for them to do some of the heavy lifting.

[delrem]

2. Ah, you want the Europeans to do more heavy lifting in the same old wars. Cool.

[Chan790]

3. No, more like I'd like them to do more of the heavy lifting in the new inevitable wars.

If there's going to be a war that threatens US and NATO-ally interests...it'd be nice to take one off and let the other people whose interests are threatened deal with it. Do you know the last time a US President got through their Presidency with no military actions whatsoever?

Neither did I. (I had to look it up.) I did know it wasn't in the past century.

To recap:

Obama: No
Bush: No
Clinton: No
Bush: No
Reagan:
Carter: No
Ford: No
Nixon: No
LBJ: No
JFK: No
Eisenhower: No
Truman: No
FDR: No
Hoover: Closest in recent history...still No. Inherited US troops abroad and drew down conflicts ultimately ended on his schedule under FDR.
Coolidge: Nope.
Harding: No.
Wilson: No.
Taft: No.
***
Only William Henry Harrison did not have a military action and that's because he died after just 6 weeks in office...so really in the history of the US, only 1 President, a barely President, has not had a military action during their term in office. I'm guessing the next president, even if they're an unequivocal pacifist, is going to have at-least one military action during their term of office. I'd like the rest of NATO to give us a war off.

[Ken Burch]

5. It might help if we had a president someday who DIDN't see future war as inevitable.

And, especially, if we had one who didn't feel obligated(as JFK seems to have)to go out and LOOK for a war to get into just to display "vigah".

That mindset led us straight to Da Nang,

[Ken Burch]

4. OK, not total pacifism(no country can actually do that)

but limit our war footprint to defense of U.S. territory against external attack
(and no, revolutionary fervor spreading, say, from Latin America wouldn't count as "external attack" in my proposal).