Chuck Grassley Takes Swipe At Ron Paul’s Foreign Policy
On Friday’s Washington Journal on C-SPAN, long time Iowa Senator (R) Charles Grassley was the guest for about 45 minutes talking about the Iowa caucus this coming Tuesday.
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Though Grassley said he wasn’t endorsing any particular candidate, he was asked to compare and contrast the candidates competing in the state.
Grassley, like most of the Republican establishment, took a jab at Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s foreign policy saying, “one aspect of one candidate is about the only one where I find total disagreement , that would be the foreign policy, or lack of foreign policy of Ron Paul”. See at approximately the 3 minute mark.
In addition, Politico reports that Grassley said Friday on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” that voters will reject Ron Paul’s isolationist foreign policy.
Strangely, he stated on that show, “I don’t think the United States can lead for world peace as we have for the last 50 years if we’re not actively engaged and trying to prevent war as opposed to fighting wars.” Huh? Is that what we’ve been doing?
The officially stated goals of the foreign policy of the United States, as mentioned in the Foreign Policy Agenda of the U.S. Department of State, are “to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.”
A common definition of foreign policy is “how a country will act with respect to other countries politically, socially, economically, and militarily, and to a somewhat lesser extent, how it behaves towards non-state actors. Foreign policy can also be known as international relations policy or simply diplomacy”.
Diplomacy.
What I would like to ask Mr. Grassley and the other Republicans is why do they consistently equate a strong foreign policy with military action and adventurism and preemptive military strikes?
Does anyone, I certainly don’t, believe that if Iran (the latest “monster to destroy” according to John Quincy Adams) were to attack or if there was an imminent attack with any type of weapons on the United States, that a President Paul wouldn’t turn Tehran into rubble. I believe he would. We’d go in and take care of business without a decade or more of costly and dangerous occupation.
Lastly, I would ask Sen. Grassley, who is supposedly a conservative and speaks of smaller government, how does he think that the current Bush/Obama foreign policy demonstrates limited government. In fact, I believe it is the antithesis of a limited, Constitutional government.
