I Have an Idea

Let's just pack up and go home. That's what the paleos (conservative, libertarian, and liberal) want us to do. So let's just do it:

• Let's pull all of our armed forces back to the United States and its territorial waters. (Better yet, let's disband the armed forces: threats to the U.S. are merely illusory.)

• Let's leave Western Europe to rot in its own socialistic, Muslim-infested juices.

• Let's leave the Turks, Kurds, sheikhs, Jihadists, and others to fight it out over the fate of the Middle East and North Africa and their vast reservoirs of oil. (Though we should ensure that Israel is well-stocked with nuclear weapons before we leave.)

• Let's leave Central and South America, with their oil and other natural resources, to Hugo Chavez and his ilk.

• Let's leave China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan to fight it out over the fate of East Asia.

• Let's leave India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan to fight it out over the fate of South and Southwest Asia.

• Let's allow the resurgent imperialism of Vladimir Putin to feast on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the "Stans," and who knows what else.

• Let's just pretend that everything will turn out all right: that someone else will deal with the predators out there; that natural resources won't be monopolized by despots; and that international trade will flow apace.

• Let nothing stand between us and the Stalins, Hitlers, and Maos of the 21st Century.

Let's just do it -- and leave this legacy for our descendants:

• More widespread poverty than at any time since the Great Depression. (Not the "simple but happy" life of the Luddite Left's imagining.)

• A garrison state, devoting a large share of a reduced national output to the (perhaps futile) task of keeping predators at bay.

Is that what the paleos want? That's what they seem to want, given their inability either (a) to find a real threat to our existence or (b) to offer a coherent strategy for dealing with those enemies whose existence they are willing to acknowledge.

Related posts:
Not Enough Boots
Defense as the Ultimate Social Service