The mission statement of our local Tea Party here in Montgomery County, Indiana reads,

“We are a group of people who want a government smaller in size and less involved in our daily lives.
We want to be represented by officials who demonstrate fiscal responsibility.
We want to be represented by officials who follow the principles of the Constitution and do not try and change the system that has worked so well.”

Keeping this in mind, what should our Tea Party’s stance be toward U.S. foreign policy?

It doesn’t seem to me that we can live by our mission statement and at the same time think it is a good idea for America to be the policeman of the world. The U.S. currently has our military stationed in over 900 bases around the world and in 135 foreign countries. Our military has been stationed in Germany, Italy, and Japan since the end of World War II. The original justification for this was countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War. However, the Cold War ended over 20 years ago. What is the reason for them to be there now?

Our military has been in South Korea since the truce of 1953. The original justification was the Domino Theory, that if South Korea fell to Communism then the other Asian countries would follow. With the demonstrated worldwide failure of the Communist experiment, what is the justification for our military to be there now? You need only look at a nighttime satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula, see North Korea completely black and void of electricity, and South Korea completely lit up and thriving, to realize it is a ridiculous idea to think that North Korea is any match for South Korea. This situation has repeated itself over and over again since the end of World War II, be it Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, or the other Persian Gulf states. The result is that these nations can now get away with spending much less on their own defense, because the U.S. is there to pick up the slack. The result is that these other countries enjoy much higher government-guaranteed benefits such as a 35 hour work week, 9 weeks of paid vacation per year, and guaranteed health coverage. Meanwhile, U.S. taxpayers, who are footing the bill for these foreign countries’ defense, we enjoy none of these benefits.

Even more than opposing the idea of trying to be the world’s policeman, the Tea Party should oppose our government’s attempts at nation-building. Shortly after 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan and defeated the Taliban after only a few months. We had Osama bin Laden trapped in Tora Bora. However, we inexcusably let him slip through our fingers. When the search and the fighting drug out after several years, we added the nation-building mission.

Shortly after invading Iraq, and realizing there were no weapons of mass destruction there, we stayed and switched the mission to nation-building. In nine years we spent a trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to rebuild infrastructure, schools, a legitimate court system, and security apparatus. Yet when I was deployed there in 2008 all I saw was destruction, poverty, an overwhelming U.S. presence, and worst of all defense contractors profiting heavily off it all. One day a group of us visited a Baghdad grade school to donate school supplies to the classrooms there. I will never forget the distrusting looks the Iraqi boys there gave us that day. We were the occupiers in their eyes, not liberators. I didn’t blame the U.S. servicemen for that, of course. We were playing the cards we were dealt and we did it to the best of our ability. But, I did resent our politicians for this flawed foreign policy that they forced upon the military to execute. They failed to follow the Constitution and obtain a Congressional declaration of war, and then they doubled the sin by failing to have clearly stated objectives and an exit strategy to prevent a long, drawn out, conflict. This has cost the American people in both lives and national treasure. In both Iraq and Afghanistan this nation-building has shown little success. After the longest wars in U.S. history, both countries are more unstable than before we invaded.

Our national debt now exceeds our GDP for the first time in history. We can never hope to pay off the $15 trillion debt we have allowed our government to accumulate. Our treasury is now between a rock and a hard place, meaning that the U.S. will have to either default on its debt or will “print” trillions more dollars to cover the bill. If the U.S. defaults the result will be reneging payment to millions of U.S. Treasury bondholders which are principally retirement funds and the Social Security trust fund. If the U.S. “prints” the trillions of dollars it will cause a hyperinflation like Germany the 1920’s, where it will take a wheelbarrow full of dollars to simply buy a loaf of bread. That will be the price we pay for our flawed foreign policy of attempting to maintain a global military empire.

One of the reasons I am proud to be a member of our Tea Party is that so many of us are proud to express our faith in God. We start our meetings with a prayer. We acknowledge we can do nothing without God and that in everything we do, we should do to please Him and to do His will. This should impact our position on our foreign policy as well. We would do well to remember the Christian “Just War” doctrine which reads as follows:

“All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed. The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. The following four conditions must exist for a "Just War”:

1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the United States must be lasting, grave, and certain;

2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3. There must be serious prospects of success;

4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders even worse than the evil to be eliminated.“

We in this Tea Party of ours say we stand for smaller government that is fiscally responsible and follows the principles of the Constitution. If we truly believe this, we must stand for a Constitutional and fiscally responsible foreign policy. The United States spends more money on weapon systems and sophisticated surveillance systems than the rest of the world combined. For overall military spending, the entire world’s militaries combined spend about $1500 billion. Of that the U.S. spends about $700 billion, or almost half of the world’s total. China is the next highest at $100 billion, a mere 1/7 of our spending. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier battle groups. There is no other Navy in the world with more than 2, and our biggest Naval rivals, China and Russia, have only one a piece. The U.S. has 3,300 warplanes. That is more than twice what China has and 50% more than what Russia has.

To be told that cutting our military budget would be dangerous to our national security is not only disingenuous, it is dishonest. What is truly dangerous is for the United States to be foolish enough to follow in the Roman Empire’s and Soviet Union’s footsteps of spending so much on our military that we collapse economically from the inside out. Most U.S. military spending has nothing to do with national defense. It instead goes to fund that beast that President Eisenhower warned us about at his farewell address: The military-industrial complex. When I was in the U.S. Navy I witnessed this firsthand. In 1995 the U.S. conducted cruise missile attacks against Bosnian Serbs. Over the preceding decade different military contractors had developed both Navy-launched cruise missiles and Air Force-launched smart bombs and both were anxious to prove their equipment worked in an actual wartime environment. When it became obvious that we were planning a missile strike against Bosnia, the Navy and Air Force argued with each other over whose weapon would be used for which target. This was not to win a military battle, but to win business for their respective defense contractor. In the end the missile strike planners simply allowed both an Air Force missile and a Navy missile to hit the same target, even though the target only required one weapon. Keep in mind that these missiles cost close to $1 million a piece. This was taxpayer money spent, not on national defense, but instead on increasing the profits of Ratheon, McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed-Martin, and Teledyne.

When I was deployed to Iraq, I witnessed the military industrial-complex reach into the Army. KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, held the defense contract for almost every aspect of life for a U.S. service member in Iraq or Afghanistan. They constructed the living areas, cooked the food, provided laundry services, provided the repair services, made the drinking water, provided the sewage service, and the electrical services. While I was there KBR was under investigation for faulty electrical wiring that caused the electrocution deaths of over a dozen U.S. service members. Master electricians from the United States had to be flown over to Iraq to re-inspect thousands of living areas to verify they were safe. Yet, instead of holding them accountable, the U.S. government awarded them the contract again!

Iraq and Afghanistan are full of American civilians in their 20’s that work for contractors doing jobs such as running internet network cable and are paid more than $300,000 per year plus all of their living and travel expenses while staying there. One young contractor bragged to me that it was so great to be working there because after three years he could retire a millionaire. And then there is the contractor one of my officers had befriended that came to him one day in tears. She was an honest girl who couldn’t understand why her boss was telling her to mark down 8 hours on her timesheet when she was only working 2 hours per day. And these are merely the accounts that I personally encountered while there only one year. There are typically 2 contractors for every service member there. While I was there, there were more than 150,000 troops in Iraq. I cannot begin to imagine the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that was happening among those 300,000 contractors over 10 years.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize defense contractors contribute extensively to the re-election campaigns of Congressmen involved in deciding who gets awarded military contracts. A significant portion of military spending has little to do with National Defense, and everything to do with profits and getting re-elected. I urge everyone in the Tea Party to take this into consideration the next time our elected officials or political pundits tell us that deep cuts to our military budget would be dangerous to national security.

Recent news headlines read that Iran is poised to develop a nuclear weapon and is enriching uranium. In reaction, the U.S. is imposing sanctions even stricter than the ones that we already had in place against Iran. In reaction Iran made offhand threats to restrict shipping into the Persian Gulf. The U.S. in turn began discussing the merits of a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Yet the proof of Iran’s threat to U.S. national security is never clearly defined. Iran does not have a missile with the range to hit U.S. soil. Iran does not have a bomber aircraft with the range to reach U.S. soil and even if it did we could easily shoot it down well before it got close to U.S. territory.

Pundits who claim Ahmadinejad said he would "wipe Israel off the map” are basing that quote off of a mis-translated phrase. Genuine Persian language specialists have pointed out that the original statement in Farsi actually said that Israel would collapse: “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time” is the accurate translation.

Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, said that an air force strike against Iran’s nuclear installations would be “a stupid thing.” Dagan added his opinion that, “Any strike against [the civilian program] is an illegal act according to international law.”

Philip Giraldi, who served as a CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, reported that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded with high confidence in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program as of 2003. They reviewed the evidence again in 2009-10 and concluded that there was still no solid evidence that the program had been in any way revived. We are about to repeat the same mistake we made going to war in Iraq, in which the entire reason we are going to war is over a WMD capability that doesn’t exist. Some say Iran poses a threat to the world’s oil supply by being able to shut down access to the Persian Gulf. This argument is also dishonest. The U.S. has the mightiest Navy and intelligence service in the world. If the Iranian Navy actually attempted to blockade the Gulf, it would be the excuse we were looking for to destroy their Navy, and the Iranians know that. Once the shooting started it would only take the U.S. Navy a few days to destroy the threat and reopen the Gulf. Most Iranian Naval vessels would be destroyed before they ever left port.

Even after considering all of these facts, if we still consider Iran a threat, then as Christians we must first make sure it would be a “Just War” in the Christian sense. Even if we somehow could justify it, the President must first clearly define the objectives for the military action he is requesting, and then obtain a Congressional declaration of war against Iran before deploying any forces against them. If Congress declares war, the President should then direct the military to go in overwhelmingly against the legitimate military targets and ensure the mission is accomplished quickly, and then get out and bring our service members back home.

That is what a Constitutional foreign policy looks like. The President must have a Congressional declaration of war before he is empowered as the commander-in-chief to deploy the military into combat anywhere in the world. Barring a formal state of war, there is little justification for permanently stationing U.S. troops on foreign soil. After all, how many foreign military bases do we see on U.S. soil? Besides, the Navy and Marine Corps will still be patrolling the world’s oceans to defend U.S. national security threats abroad.

This sort of non-interventionist foreign policy was the tradition of our Founding Fathers. George Washington stated in his farewell address, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Thomas Jefferson stated in his 1801 inaugural address, “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Are these the rantings of people 200 years removed, before we were considered a powerful nation? Hardly. For a majority of our nation’s history and for the most rapid period of prosperity we practiced a non-interventionist foreign policy. In fact, the first significant foreign invasion by the U.S. wasn’t until almost a hundred years later in the 1898 Spanish-American War when we occupied the Philippines. We accomplished this by avoiding an isolationist trade policy such as protectionist tariffs and trade embargos. We accomplished this by avoiding the entangling alliances of political-military treaties, such as NATO and the United Nations.

James Madison once wrote that, “Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded… War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” If the Tea Party truly stands for upholding liberty, for fiscal responsibility, and for Constitutionally-limited government, we would do well to live by James Madison’s warning.