During the 19th century our leaders remained true to the foreign policy of our founding fathers, but a major shift in dogma occurred at the turn of the 20th century. This shift occurred primarily due to the collapse of the British Empire at the beginning of the century and our competition with the Soviets in later years. Since the end of World War II, the driving force behind the United States foreign policy has been our concern over the Israeli state and our desire to control the flow of oil in the Middle East. During these past fifty years, our leaders have believed that they can manipulate and intervene in foreign affairs without suffering any consequences. Despite being proved wrong repeatedly during this time period, our leaders still ignore the concept of “blowback.”

Blowback, a term actually coined by the CIA, is the idea that all actions overseas can result in unintended consequences. In the 1950s, the U.S. helped to install a pro-Western military dictator in Iran. Twenty years later, Iranian extremists, angry due to American involvement, seized the U.S. Embassy and held 66 people hostage for over a year. The extremist government, which now exists in Iran, is a direct result of the coup which America participated in 50 years ago. In the 1980s, we allied ourselves with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war and helped Saddam raise to power; in the same decade, we sided ourselves with Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden in their conflict with the Soviets. When we attacked the Taliban after September 11, they were still using the weapons which we had provided to them in the 80s. These are just a few of the unintended consequences which our foreign policy has elicited.

Since World War II, 100,000 American lives have been lost in foreign conflicts—all without a formal declaration of war. We are in an economic crisis, and yet we are still determined to support an empire which costs over one trillion dollars a year to maintain. The current War on Terror is the greatest threat to civil liberties in our nation’s history, with more power being stolen by the federal government at every available opportunity. Despite all of these factors, a debate between interventionism and non-interventionism does not exist among the two major political parties. Rather, we are given the non-choice of what nation we will attack next or which foreign dictator we should fund. In these current times, we must ask ourselves if our foreign policy is truly making us safer. Is our country “hated for our freedoms,” or is its international unpopularity a result of our ceaseless meddling in the affairs of other countries? The only way to preserve the liberty which our founding fathers bestowed upon us is to seek their wisdom and return to a foreign policy of freedom.