From today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Yesterday (January 31) the Biden Administration announced yet another military aid package to Ukraine including yet more powerful weapons. This comes as a new PEW Poll shows that Americans increasingly believe that the US is doing too much to help Ukraine. Also today: The US government investigates its massive aid transfers to Ukraine and finds no misuse of funds. Shocker!
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Americans don’t understand that the most important issue in a presidential election is always foreign policy, because presidents have unilateral authority in that regard. For just about everything else, presidents have to get Congress to pass statutes, which greatly waters down the presidents’ powers.
So, which candidates are going to stop sending all this stuff to Ukraine? Certainly not Biden, and there’s no way to know what Trump would do. Before Trump, Republican candidates would be even more pro-war than Democratic ones. So there’s really no good choice here. If Americans really want to stop U.S. support for these wars, they need to greatly change their behaviors so that presidents won’t feel like they have support for them.
Presidents have historically seized unilateral authority over foreign policy in general and war in particular, especially since 1945.
Theoretically, though, Congress could take that power back.
I see representative democracies around the world engaging in class war against internal populations which are often viewed as internal enemies of national security. Creation of a modern form of democracy that can focus the intelligence of the population on complex problems largely created by old fashioned governments mainly designed to facilitate economic growth for corporations, including financial benefits of war. One person cannot come up with an alternative alone, even so, if a war is to be declared, it is clear that legislators have and will shirk adult responsibility for health and safety; some new democratically selected body is required that convenes and openly select a military and economic leaders to wage war with national popular support. Some media policies will also need to be generated that recognize war profiteers have the ability to brainwash human intelligence with fear in order generate war fever.
The Constitution only authorizes Congress to declare war (which presidents have mostly illegitimately gotten around, but that’s another issue), but presidents are the commanders-in-chief of the military and get to make all sorts of other decisions about how the military is used or not used. They also get to take the initiative on foreign policy in general, which goes way beyond the military, though the threat of the military is always lurking there.
Presidents are commanders in chief of the military when it is ‘called into the service of the United States,’ i.e. when Congress calls it into the service of the United States by declaring war.
Trump sold Ukraine weapons that Obama wouldn’t. So, we do have an idea.
An idea about what? What’s your point?
Part of your comment said: “there’s no way to know what Trump would do”
Trump also tried to make peace with North Korea, and tried to remove U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. The problem with trying to figure out what Trump would do on this issue is that the only things he really cares about are money and his ego, so it’s impossible to know what he’ll do on issues like this. Trump has been all over the place regarding the war in Ukraine, first saying that the U.S. should bomb Russia pretending to use Chinese planes, and now he says that we need to negotiate a peace deal immediately. There is really no way to know what he’d actually do on this other than to see who he puts in his cabinet and hires for his chief of staff.
I don’t disagree. I said we would have an “idea” what he’d do. That wasn’t meant as an absolute. It always depends on who is in the room with him.
If there were always world peace, world leaders of any party whether they’re liberal, centrist or conservative would focus much more on domestic affairs than foreign affairs.
Well sure, but that doesn’t negate my point.
No, it doesn’t negate your point, that’s why world misleaders have to focus more on foreign policy than domestic policy.
That’s not the point. The point is that foreign affairs is the most important issue in a presidential election, because presidents may act unilaterally on that issue.
You know, if they’re deficit spending through the ceiling, I would very much rather they put together a aid package to poultry farms instead of for more weapons to prolong bloodshed. I haven’t been able to make an omelette for months now and if any $8 a dozen eggs are on the shelves, the store actually rations them…
As the saying goes, we dream of the day when schools have enough money and the military has to have bake sales.
That said, factory farming is very environmentally and ecologically harmful, and cruel to animals. Don’t know what kind of poultry farms you’re talking about, but I certainly don’t want any more of my tax money going to the factory ones.
Americans hate a tie, the mood will change one way or the other once breakthroughs start happening.
And how is that relevant to the immorality of the U.S. provoking, funding, and arming this proxy war?
Not really sure the average American spends much time worrying about the morality of US foreign policy.