Stay Disentangled

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is that a free nation should stay disentangled from other nations but should have peace, trade, and good friendships with all nations. Our Founding Fathers desired to keep our nation separate from all other nations. They wanted to have good relationships with all nations as well as avoid as much as possible regional quarrels and disputes. They understood that alliances with some countries would automatically make them enemies to other nations.

George Washington made the following statement in his Farewell Address to the nation: "Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence." (Fitzpatrick, Writings of George Washington, 35:231.)

If our leaders would have listened to President Washington and followed his counsel, we might have avoided many problems and much expense. For over one hundred years, Progressives have been moving the United States further from the Founders' ideal of separatism and closer to internationalism. We have become entangled in almost every mess in the world because we didn't listen to good counsel.

In 1939, J. Reuben Clark, Jr., then serving as Under-Secretary of State, urged the leaders of the United States to accept the role of the peace maker of the world. He said, "America, multi-raced and multi-nationed, is by tradition, by geography, by citizenry, by natural sympathy, and by material interest, the great natural nation of the earth. God so designed it. Drawn from all races, creeds, and nations, our sympathies run to every oppressed people. Our feelings engaged on opposite sides of great differences, will in their natural course, if held in due and proper restraint, neutralize the one [with] the other. Directed in right channels, this great body of feeling for the one side or the other will ripen into sympathy and love for all misguided and misled fellowmen who suffer in any cause, and this sympathy and love will run out to all humanity in its woe….
"America, the great neutral, will thus become the peacemaker of the world, which is her manifest destiny if she lives the law of peace." (Quoted in the Freemen Digest, Oct. 1978, pp 2-3.)

If the United States had followed the counsel given by Washington and Clark, we might have avoided several wars, including World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, Afghanistan war, and the military action in Libya and other Middle Eastern nations. If the United States had truly been making peace and staying disentangled in the affairs of other nations, we might have avoided numerous terrorist attacks.

The United States needs to return to the Founders ideal of separatism - not isolationism - and become the world's peacemaker instead of the world's policeman as we are in our current internationalism.

Ideas and quotes are from The Five Thousand Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen, pp 189-197.