America’s flip-flop foreign policy: Rand Paul, Hillary Clinton and the new millennial voter

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http://www.salon.com/2014/10/11/americas_flip_flop_foreign_policy_rand_paul_hillary_clinton_and_the_new_millennial_voter/



Previously, politicians fought to be seen as more hawkish than their opponents. Here's why those days are over

America’s flip-flop foreign policy: Rand Paul, Hillary Clinton and the new millennial voter
Matthew Rozsa
Saturday, Oct 11, 2014 06:30 AM EST

Senator Rand Paul, ostensibly the heir to his father’s reputation as one of America’s premier go-to libertarians, recently said that as president he would “destroy ISIS militarily.” Given that libertarians often see eye-to-eye with the left in opposing imperialism and the security state, the media gave the story a moderate amount of attention before letting it fade into the static. After all, in the post-Romney era, what’s so new about a probable presidential aspirant flip-flopping when it’s politically expedient?

Pundits would do well to scratch a little deeper here. More specifically, they should pay attention to the backlash Paul is receiving from millennials, the group whose disproportionate support is a reason he is currently among the Republican frontrunners for the 2016 GOP nomination. Hillary Clinton, too, has paid a price for her rhetorical vacillations from hawkishness to dovishness and back again, as partially indicated by the attention given the prospective presidential candidacy of another prominent anti-interventionist, independent Senator Bernie Sanders (who caucuses with the Democrats). Combined, these developments point to one of the most important emerging stories of the 21st century: National politicians seeking to fare best at the hands of millennials must speak to their concerns about the post-9/11 military-industrial complex and security.

Before World War II, American foreign policy was theoretically based in the principles embodied in a public letter George Washington published near the end of his presidency in 1796. It stated that the United States would “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and was “neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences” in our commercial or geopolitical relationships. Americans should “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments,” he argued, recognizing them as “inauspicious to liberty” and “particularly hostile to republican liberty.” This isolationism was somewhat broadened in 1823 when James Monroe, through the so-called “Monroe Doctrine,” officially reiterated America’s avowed avoidance of international entanglements while simultaneously linking it with a vow to oppose any attempts by foreign empires to harass or colonize other nations in the Western hemisphere. Hence when Woodrow Wilson attempted to enter America into the League of Nations after World War I, he was met with resounding defeat by the nation’s bedrock isolationism.

None of this stopped the United States from starting acquisitional wars when powerful business interests could effectively lobby them to do so (the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War). At the same time, America didn’t become a superpower until the outbreak of World War II. In the same year that he violated Washington’s third-term precedent, Franklin Roosevelt ran for reelection on an open program of providing financial assistance to the Allies as they struggled against the Nazi Empire… one supported by his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie. While both candidates in the election of 1940 had to remain nominally isolationist to appease large anti-interventionist wings in their parties, the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and German declaration of war against America changed everything. Within months, America had ended 12 years of the Great Depression by building up an unprecedented military-industrial complex.