Foreign Policy
I believe in a strong national defense.
We are the strongest nation on the planet by far and I want to keep it that way. However, I believe that when we go to war, we must do so only under a formal declaration of war by Congress.
Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution says Congress shall have power to ... declare War.
We should never go to war without this declaration, and we should never go to war under the UN colors. If we declare war, we need to go in, fight to win the war, and come home.
Thomas Jefferson said that America should have peace, commerce and honest friendship with all other nations, yet entangling alliances with none. So we should never engage in nation-building, spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun, or spend our precious money and resources trying to defend other rich countries that can afford to defend themselves. This type of foreign policy is called non-intervention. This is NOT ISOLATIONISM.
I am advocating the free trade with all nations, not isolating ourselves. This is the same foreign policy that President Eisenhower advocated. He entered the 1952 presidential race to counter the isolationism of Sen Taft, and he was instrumental in ending the Korean conflict.
I would support the immediate end to the undeclared and sometimes unnanounced wars and drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and anywhere else we are engaged in hostilities and bring the troops home as soon as it is safe to do so. I would also close many of our overseas military bases and bring our troops home. We spend far too much money on defense for nations like Germany, Japan and South Korea. Those countries can now afford to spend their own money on their own defense. Instead, we run up the deficit on their defense while they save money and use it for socialized medicine.
These entangling alliances and foreign interventions incite what our own CIA calls blowback and puts our country and our soldiers lives at more risk.
The United States spends almost as much money on our military as the rest of the world does combined on military, including China. Our military is spread too thin all across the planet and only serves to feed the money machines of what President Eisenhower called the Military-Industrial Complex.