Mac-Coleman

6 September 2013 - 

What Could Possibly Be More Important Than Syria?

The importance of the crisis in Syria is overblown.  But, the President is deflecting our focus on to strategically irrelevant events in an effort to avoid facing real threats to the United States which are within our power to solve.  Consider the following strategic threats to America. 

The federal debt is almost $17,000,000,000,000, more money than the entire country produces in a year.  And, the federal government spends nearly a trillion dollars more than it receives in taxes.  Unless the President follows the Constitutional mandate to submit a legitimate annual budget and drastically reduce spending on programs that are not the federal government’s constitutional obligation, foreign countries eventually will no longer accept U.S. dollars or bonds in payment.  Our money—our sovereignty—will then be worthless.  Foreign banks and foreign interests will dictate how we pursue our own strategic interests.  If this isn’t a looming sovereignty crisis, nothing is.

Over six percent of our population resides in the U.S. illegally.  Our sovereignty—our ability to control our borders and to enforce our laws—is eroding.  Foreign interests, whose concepts of government are fundamentally different from those outlined in our Constitution, increasingly influence local, state, and federal governance.  What is a bigger threat to the United States, a civil war in Syria where victory by either side does little to change our strategic position in the region, or an administration that selectively enforces immigration laws, refuses to let states enforce immigration laws, and encourages local politicians to ignore the law with “sanctuary city” policies?  If our illegal immigration situation isn’t an invasion that sparks domestic conflict, nothing is.  

The U.S.’s self-serving administrative and regulatory government rivals any in Europe.  Currently, it uses tax enforcement powers to squelch conservative dissent.  To support an ill-conceived anti-terrorism strategy, it willfully intrudes on Americans’ legal, private communications.  By regulatory fiat, it picks winners and losers in the marketplace.  We can hardly claim moral authority as the world’s guardian of democracy and freedom when we govern ourselves more like Napoleon’s descendants than like Washington’s. 

In foreign policy decision-making, particularly in the Middle East, the President has been naïve and feckless, and has behaved dangerously.  His successes are short-lived and leave us open-ended exposure to more violence.  In March through November of 2011, for example, using UN Resolution 1973 as cover, the President acted without congressional approval and pushed NATO to conduct a bombing campaign over Libya.  Fortunately, this resulted in virtually no friendly casualties, little collateral damage on the ground, and the eventual execution of a really bad guy, Mohammar Qadafi.  But, there have been longer-term consequences of our actions, such as the rise of radical Islamist violence in the government and on the streets of Libya.  When these radical Islamists killed our ambassador and three others in Benghazi in 2012, our response went from embarrassing to criminal.  One bad foreign policy decision by our President led to another, and America and Libya now are no better off than they were in February 2011.  The next embarrassments will come if the President uses the same decision-making process in Syria that he used in Libya.

Finally, the government of the United States must seize strategic initiative in the Middle East and reject pressure to react to events like the Syrian civil war.  We can become literally energy independent instead of allowing economic and diplomatic power to flow to countries like Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.  The administration should encourage the development of ALL of America’s oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power sources.  We should become an energy exporter.  It is within our domestic power to do so.  That would dry up funds to the terrorist networks that hate America and to the organizations that threaten our friend, Israel, the only working democracy in the Middle East.  Our energy independence can reprioritize all crises in the Middle East and within the international economic arena. 

 

All strategic threats to the United States are within our domestic power to resolve.  But, the strength to use that power will never emanate from the President or Congress unless we, the people, demand they use it.  We must demand that those who govern  make these strategic changes; then and only then will we retain the status of super-power, command the world’s respect, recover our sovereignty, and reclaim the ability to define our own destiny.