Do You Like People Telling You What to Do? A Case Against U.S. Foreign Policy

Do you like people telling you what to do? Do you believe that you need to be told what to do in order to function in life? If the answer to either of these questions is "no", then why is it that our country is seemingly populated by a majority of people who have no problems with us telling other people how to live?

Take American troop deployment. Our military is currently stationed in 135 countries in the world. According to the U.S. State Department, there are currently 192 countries in the world. Source and further reading. That means that our country has troops in over 70% of the world's countries. How many of us could even find most of those countries on a map?

Look at our military budget. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SPIRI)’s 2007 Year Book on Armaments, Disarmament and International Security for 2005, the world military expenditure for its individual militaries in 2006 is $1204 Billion in today's dollars. Of that estimated $1.204 TRILLION, approximately 46% of that is contributed by the United States. By contrast, the nearest second place countries are UK, France, Japan, and China at 4-5% each. Source and further reading Think about it.

Even U.S. foreign aid is designed to bully recipient countries and make them American client states at the sacrifice of their sovereignty. This has been a failed program since the days of Truman and the Marshall Plan. For further reading and research, I point the reader to this analysis and article by the CATO Institute.

I have no problem with helping other people in need. I regularly give to charities, myself. But, when I give money, I don't hang around to tell the charity how and where to spend it. I don't tie my donation to their listening to what I have to say or else I will withhold my donation next year.

The problem with this Bad Neighbor Policy that has been put in place by our government is that it makes every American look bad. What our government does in our name should be of concern to all of us.

But, I digress. The same Americans who believe that every Iraqi is a dirty and despicable as the late Saddam Hussein recoil in horror with the thought that the world would view every American with the same lens they view George Bush.

Here is an interesting article by a writer in the United Kingdom that shows how the American government uses foreign aid to bully other countries, yet accurately assigns the blame on that bullying on our government (where it belongs) and not the American people. He posits that we are not given all the facts and, thus, should not be held to the same level of accountability as should our corporations and government.

In conclusion, the idea that other countries in the world need to have our money and our troops to be safe and to survive in this world is chauvinism, pure and simple. Our country is bankrupting itself by having military troops stationed all over the world unnecessarily and in enabling foreign governments not to learn how to make their own decisions, effectively blocking them from learning how to do things on their own. If any one of us doesn't feel the need to be told how to do everything by someone else, then we have no right to impose our own ideas on other people and countries.