the pros and cons of foreign policy activism in the Middle East

Excerpts from a thoughtful piece from Bret Stephens in Tuesday's WSJ on Paul's foreign policy...

Stephens is sympathetic to Paul's views but not fully convinced (within his own logic)-- and by the end of the article, professes to be quite happy that Paul remains on the fringe. The ending is, to me, incoherent. (I won't reproduce it here.) The rest of the article is an interesting read on Libertarian political philosophy, Middle Eastern history, and the tension between activism and non-intervention in foreign policy affairs (especially those in the Middle East).

Ron Paul invited the audience at last Thursday's Republican debate to entertain the notion that the Middle East would be a better place with the U.S. out of the picture.

"It's time that we come to the point where we believe the world can solve some of their problems without us," said the Texas congressman, who has raised a mountain of cash on the strength of such views....

Dr. Paul is a libertarian, and a libertarian's core belief is that a person's pursuit of happiness is, or ought to be, his own affair....

Thus, speaking of America's relationship with Israel, Dr. Paul insisted at Thursday's debate that "we need to recognize they deserve their sovereignty, just as we deserve our sovereignty." Of the feuds within the Arab world, he offered that "none of the Arab nations wanted Saddam Hussein in Kuwait and I think they could have taken care of Saddam Hussein back then and saved all the mess we have now."

Of Israel's relationship with its neighbors, he argued that if only America got out of the way by cutting off the aid spigot (which, he claimed, favored the Arabs by a 3-to-1 ratio), there would "be a greater incentive for Israel and the Palestinians and all the Arab nations to come together and talk." And of America's relationship with the Arab world, the congressman said in a previous debate that "they attack us because we've been over there."

Dr. Paul's own remedy is that if "we trade with everybody and talk with them . . . there's a greater incentive to work these problems out." But here's a rub.

As historian Michael Oren observes in "Power, Faith and Fantasy," his history of America's 230-year involvement in the Middle East, as early as the 1790s "many Americans had grown dismayed with the country's Middle East policy of admonishing the [Barbary] pirates while simultaneously coddling them with bribes." It was precisely out of a desire to "trade with everybody" that the early American republic was forced to build a navy, and then to go to war, to defend its commercial interests, a pattern that held true in World War I and the Persian Gulf "Tanker War" of the 1980s.

These details of history pose a problem not just to Dr. Paul's views of the Middle East, but to the intellectual architecture of libertarianism itself. Liberal societies are built on the belief in (and defense of) individual rights, but also on the overawing power of government to transform natural rights into civil ones. In the same way, trade between nations is only possible in the absence of robbers, pirates and other rogues. Whose job is it to get rid of them?...

That isn't to say that Dr. Paul's specific arguments against American entanglement in the Middle East are purely spurious. Does U.S. diplomacy invariably facilitate peaceful outcomes in the region? The seven feckless years of the Oslo process suggest not. Does it make sense to arm Saudi Arabia and Egypt at the same time we arm Israel? The verdict will depend on what kind of governments the two Arab states have in, say, 10 years time. Should the Bush administration have backed Pervez Musharraf to the hilt these past seven years? Had it done more to cultivate democratic alternatives to the Pakistan strongman in years past, it might not have seen its Plan B vanish with Benazir Bhutto's assassination last month.

These questions turn on differences of tactics and strategy, whereas Dr. Paul's objection is philosophical. It helps his case rhetorically that he can tally the costs of America's involvement in the region -- the billions spent and thousands killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; the "blowback," as he puts it, from supporting Saddam at one moment and opposing him the next...