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John Quincy Adams On Syria

In 1821 John Quincy Adams gave a powerful address on the proper place of an independent nation in a world of fellow independent nations. The whole address is quite stirring, sadly we have few statesmen capable of speaking with such eloquence today, but this is the most pertinent part.

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

Read the whole thing here. People who think Barack Obama was a great orator need to read what a real intellectual sounded like.

But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

America should be a nation that wishes the people of the world well. I want nothing but peace for the people of the Middle East. I want nothing less than health and prosperity for the people of Africa. I would love to see freedom and liberty for the people of China. But America has plenty of problems at home without going forth to seek out monsters, or worse yet unintentionally (?) create new monsters where none existed before. I hope everything turns out well for other people but we can’t fix their problems for them. We can’t even fix our own.

Since the end of World War II, America has been the “leader of the free world” and thanks to our position we have been far too focused on “fixing” the rest of the world. We have pursued this Quixotic quest to our own detriment and perhaps our doom. How many thousands of young men have died or been maimed, how many trillions of dollars of our treasure have we spent, how many enemies have we created, in our failed and still failing quest to turn the rest of the world into America? Is the world a better place now thanks to our efforts?

The Middle East is still a mess and is now less stable than it was when Germany and Japan surrendered. Hells bells, it is more unstable now than it was ten years ago thanks to the combination of W. Bush wrecking Iraq like a toddler having a tantrum and the incredible and apparently willful incompetence of Obama and Hillary making it worse by destabilizing the rest of the region. So Qaddafi is gone but there are open air slave markets in Libya, congrats! Be sure to polish that Peace Prize Barry!

China is still a repressive dictatorship but is poised to become the economic superpower of the world thanks to America abdicating that role so globalist corporations can make their quarterly numbers and we can buy cheap plastic crap from Wal-Mart to get that dopamine hit.

In Afghanistan the Taliban are poised to take back over and now the ones that are left are even more radicalized than before. Should be good times for the young girls who show a little too much ankle when the morality police drive by. Just to the south, India and Pakistan are still feuding over Kashmir with nukes pointed at each other.

Europe is a disaster of suicidal altruism, as native Europeans refuse to have children thanks to hysterics from people like Greta Thunberg while at the same time importing mass numbers of low IQ, permanent social welfare dependent people from the third world. Only the former Warsaw Pact nations hold any hope for the future.

South and Central America are collectively one big dumpster fire, other than Uruguay and Costa Rica. Chief among them is the failed narco-state of 120 million people to our south, Mexico, where most of the country is run by the drug cartels and the rest is run by corrupt politicians doing the bidding of the drug cartels. As we just saw, the drug cartels outgun the military and there is almost nothing between the cartels and our own soil.

Our neighbor to the north just re-elected Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister. The guy is a clown and pretty dumb to boot. Barack Obama even stepped in to endorse him at the last moment, but strangely no one seems to wonder about Obama trying to influence a foreign election. Meanwhile Canada is importing people from the third world by the bushel, in a nation with a relatively small population. Canada is a ticking time bomb just to our north and that border is even less defended than our southern border.

Russia is still trying to find her way after the fall of the USSR. If they can ever overcome the corruption and the vodka drinking, Russia could be a force to be reckoned with instead of a silly diversionary tactic for Democrats to blame poor campaigning by an awful candidate.

Africa is Africa and always will be because it is full of Africans.

So I guess that leaves Greenland and Japan. They seem to be doing OK.

The point being, we have been beating our collective heads against the wall for 70 years and it has done nothing but sap our strength. That might be the whole point of this interventionist experiment.

That brings me back to Syria. I think John Quincy Adams would be irritated and enraged that Americans are engaged in little conflicts here and there all over the world with no sense of what exactly the American national security interest is.

As for me, this is my take on Syria, the Kurds, that whole mess.

Life in the Trump era: a bunch of people that couldn’t tell you anything about the Kurds or find Syria on a map without the aid of Google suddenly becoming geopolitical and military experts for no reason other than “anything Trump does is automatically bad”. 🙄

— Arthur Sido (v. 2.0) 👌 (@SidoArthur) October 22, 2019

By next week this whole thing will have blown over and the NeverTrump neocons and their ideological brethren on the Trump hating far left will have found something else to breathlessly declare Trump has done that deserves “impeachment”. Meanwhile the wreckage our interventionist foreign policy leaves behind will continue to trap people around the world in misery.

It is time for Trump to get back to what he promised: putting America first.

1 Comment

  1. John

    I have been against fighting in any country involved in a civil war since . . . forever. Not a good place to be. Tossing weapons to one side or the other? Okay, I can see that.

    Nothing worth a single American life in Syria. BTW – you linked to your old blog in a recent post. Fascinating stuff!!!

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