The other Republican candidates concede that Dr. Paul’s prescription for the US economy makes sense. They don’t have the guts to tell the voters how bad the nation’s fiscal situation is themselves, but they’re happy that Ron Paul does. “But”, they say, “Ron Paul’s foreign policy is too DANGEROUS!” Why, if Dr. Paul were President, we might miss out on the opportunity to participate in the next Middle Eastern war.

No one need fear that our children will miss out on all wars. There will occasionally be wars that we can’t avoid. However, launching pre-emptive, undeclared wars on faked pretenses does not make us “safe”, it just makes us more enemies. Everyone still remembers that we were lied into the Iraq War on the very same “OMG they have nuclear weapons” nonsense that Romney and Obama are spewing now. If we attack Iran, we will establish the United States as the advocate of the ‘Adolf Hitler School of International Relations’, which consists mainly of pre-emptive attacks on small countries. That worked really well for Adolf; for the first couple of years his approval ratings were sky-high. Later, however, the policy led to a bit of “blow-back” and the destruction of all German cities.

The same politicians who want us to spend more trillions to pre-emptively attack more countries are the same politicians who used our tax money to pay for the Pakistani and North Korean nuclear weapons. Muslim nations receive five times more US foreign aid than Israel, and North Korea just got an increase in its foreign aid last week to celebrate the succession of the new hereditary dictator. The US has helped every dictator in the world since 1945, including Castro, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin. We also funded the Taliban both through direct foreign aid and via the Pakistani spy service… in fact, the GAO reports that the Taliban still receives at least $500 million a year in payoffs from US contractors in Afghanistan.

So the wars that we are told will make us “safe” have to be fought against the regimes that our foreign aid created. Wouldn’t it be more effective to stop funding dictatorships in the first place? Then instead of fighting for one Afghan warlord against another, our military budget could be used to defend the United States.

Has any nation ever tried such a crazy dangerous foreign policy? Well, actually, almost every nation in the world today intervenes less in other nations’ affairs than the US. In fact, in 2011 the US spends nearly as much on our military as all other nations combined. Even Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia never got anywhere near that level of expenditure.

What happens to a country that doesn’t give foreign aid, and doesn’t get involved in other people’s ethnic and religious feuds? Fortunately we have a couple of test samples: Sweden (which hasn’t been at war since 1814) and Switzerland. Sweden’s neighbors are peaceful, but the Swiss on the other hand, live on the geopolitical “wrong side of the tracks”.

Switzerland has not been in a foreign war of any kind since 1815. This would be astounding, even miraculous, for any nation. But Switzerland borders Germany. And France. And Italy. And Austria. And Liechtenstein. Now Liechtenstein has rarely lashed out in Blitzkrieg in a desperate bid to reign über alles, but ALL of Switzerland's other neighbors have spent their entire histories invading other countries.

In addition to the encircling foreign marauders, Switzerland itself is composed of four different ethnic groups (German, French, Italian, Romansh) that get along as well as, e.g., Germans and French. They don't even speak the same language!

Yet the Swiss peace prevailed through the centuries. The Kaiser didn't attack the Swiss. Hitler didn't attack the Swiss (though he thought about it a lot). Stalin started to pursue some refugees into Liechtenstein at the end of WWII, but retreated rather than face the Swiss-Liechtenstein alliance. Terrorists don't attack the Swiss.

Nobody attacks the Swiss. Not even the Swiss attack the Swiss; their crime rate is minuscule.

The features of the Swiss system for keeping the peace are simple. They have a president with no power to declare war (of course ours can't either, but no one has told HIM that for decades). They have a very small professional army, even small per capita. And they have very strict gun control. By which they mean that every Swiss male must have a gun, except for those who also have to carry a missile launcher or a mortar. Swiss women are not subject to compulsory military service, but many of them frequent the rifle ranges anyway. In the event of any attack on Switzerland, the whole Swiss population becomes the army.

As an additional deterrent against megalomania, the Swiss have rigged the tunnel vaults of their banks for demolition. Any dictator attacking Switzerland will find the gold in his numbered bank account buried in rubble hundreds of meters under mountains swarming with snipers and missile launchers. It is known that Hitler had a numbered account... maybe that was in the back of his mind when he chickened out.

Switzerland, unlike the United States, has also provided for defense of the lives of its civilian population against nuclear terrorism. Realizing during the Cold War that nuclear weapons in the hands of power-mad politicians posed a potential public health threat, the Swiss started a nationwide shelter-building program in 1960. By 1991, the Swiss had shelters under every house, every school, and every business. A Swiss citizen is never more than a few minutes from a concrete blast shelter with a filtered air supply.

The entire Swiss shelter program was accomplished for somewhere on the order of 35 dollars (1990 dollars) per year per capita. The US spends vastly more every year to support a military capable only of intervening in Third World nations that do not have WMDs.

The huge US war machine could not even intercept civilian airliners on 9-11, let alone stop nuclear-tipped cruise and ballistic missiles from a major power. Nor are there bunkers with filtered air supplies under our glass cities or particle-board suburbs. The only civil defense bunkers in the US are for the President and the emergency backup supply of bureaucrats. Everyone else is nuclear fodder, except for those provident few (such as the Mormons) who build their own shelters to protect their families.

Switzerland does not send troops to intervene in other nations. Switzerland does not spend tens of billions of dollars yearly to fund dictators around the world, nor did Switzerland donate hundreds of billions of dollars to the Warsaw Pact through bank "loans." Switzerland does not send billions of dollars worth of weaponry every year to the warring tribes in the Middle East. Switzerland has no enemies. Yet the Swiss are armed to the teeth and dug into every hill and under every building.

The US intervenes everywhere, spies on everyone, supports every faction in every fight. We have as many enemies as there are hate-filled people in the world. We have a vastly expensive conventional army (though the best units are marching back and forth in Middle Eastern deserts, Afghanistan, Korea, and other "strategic" places). We have vast numbers of offensive nuclear weapons for murdering the civilian populations of cities (but against whom will we retaliate in the event of an anonymous nuclear terrorist attack?).

But we have no civil defenses for our children, no shelters, no thought-out plan for recovery from attack. In fact, when we suffered a few thousand dead on 9-11, we panicked and did ten times more economic damage to ourselves than the terrorists had. We also let ourselves be suckered into joining a Middle Eastern tribal war without end, on transparently fraudulent grounds.

Worse, our fears have destroyed much of our own Constitutional freedom. Would we be braver now, if a few anonymous smuggled nuclear bombs killed millions? Or would we just descend tamely into dictatorship and 1984-style surveillance without a struggle?

Ron Paul’s “dangerous” foreign policy of ceasing to support foreign dictators would let us rebuild our own economy and our military defenses as well. Even more importantly, it would let us recover the Constitutional freedoms that were the underlying moral base for both our economic and military strength.

Like Thomas Jefferson, Ron Paul will lead us in war, or against pirates or terrorists, if we are attacked. I doubt Ron Paul would have forgotten about Osama bin Laden after 9-11… unlike the irrelevant attack on Iraq which let bin Laden escape for ten years. But Dr. Paul won’t start any more undeclared wars. The world will always be dangerous no matter what we do, but the first step is to stop funding dictators and stop starting wars.

-Bill Walker