668. What Is Nation-Building? And Why Ron Paul Warned It Makes Us Less Safe

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today, I want to talk about nation building and why it always backfires, and I'm going to use examples from the wisdom taught to us by Ron Paul, who had a lot to say about this.

First, before we get into it, let me just kind of have you put you into a scenario that you can imagine yourself in. So imagine that you live in a small city that has a pretty corrupt mayor, and people keep trying to voice their opposition, and they keep getting shut down, and it's becoming very frustrating. And the surrounding cities, they can see that something is wrong.

They can see that your leader is corrupt, and that maybe something needs to change. Now their leaders aren't perfect either, but they're a little bit better than yours, okay? And so they start thinking that they know what's best for your city, okay? So there's another city a few towns away, and their mayor says, you know what, I feel really bad for them. We need to help them.

We need to make sure that they don't fall under this corrupt leader. So we're going to invade their city and tell them what they should do, and tell them what kind of government to have, and we're basically going to take control of that city. And we're not really going to ask them if they want us to, we're just going to do it.

How would you feel about that? There'd probably be some mixed reactions. There's probably some people that think, you know what, we're so sick of dealing with our mayor, sure, we'll invite the help. And then there's probably other people saying, hold on, your city doesn't know our city's history and our city's traditions.

They don't know what the things that bind us together, they don't know what we want any more than our own leader does, because they're not part of us. They don't even go here, you know? So that's what happens on a foreign policy front, where countries, a lot of times it's the U.S., go into other countries thinking like, well, we know what's best for them, and they have a corrupt leader, so we're going to come in and we're going to give them freedom. It's by force.

So we're going to give them freedom at the point of a gun or missiles or, you know, bombs. And it's not a peaceful process. And the people who end up getting really hurt in the long run are the civilians who end up being casualties and, you know, countries get destroyed.

And this is basically what happened with the Vietnam War, except what we did was even sneakier because we just tried to install a leader that we liked. So that happens with nation building, too, where we meddle. And I say we, not me, not you.

Government leaders in the United States, the Pentagon, these military leaders, they come in behind the scenes and they try to control another nation, what goes on in another nation's politics. And that causes a lot of problems and it creates instability all around the globe. It makes us less safe.

And it's funny because it's always marketed to us because propaganda is just marketing from the government. It gives us this idea that we that they're thankful for our freedoms, that we need to make them less free to give them American freedoms. And we heard this a lot during the war on terror.

Growing up in the early 2000s in the post 9-11 world was a really weird time because we were constantly being told that other countries hated us for our freedom and that we needed to go bring them our freedom that apparently they hated. And you know, that was going to be this full fledged war. And what we didn't think is so they we were told they hated us for our freedom and that made us that made us less safe because they were going to come and bomb us and everything.

But few people stop to say, well, maybe other countries don't like us because we're going in and telling them what to do with their government. That's not our place. Not only are we going in, we're going in with bombs.

You know, somebody may have lost their their father, their uncle, because an American army came in and bombed them. And so, of course, they don't like us. We wouldn't like it if like I used the mayor in the city example, we wouldn't like it if another mayor brought in tanks and everything into our city.

It's it's natural to want to fight back against that. And so Ron Paul really spoke about this. He called it blowback and this this idea that when we go in and we try to nation build, we go in and we occupy these other countries and we tell them what to do and we bring our military when we do that.

People get mad. People get irritated. And guess what? They're trying to fight for their own freedoms that now our army is is preventing them from having and they want to get revenge.

And so it's the blowback is they come and then they harm us and they, you know, start hating Americans, even though you and I didn't do anything. So that's this concept of blowback. So it makes us less safe.

That's one of the big ones. Right. And it's also impeding on the rights of other people.

But it's also expensive, guys. It costs so much money for us to be playing the policemen of the world. And the Pentagon has an unreal budget.

I mean, if we want to talk about where a lot of this this extra fat, the pork is in the budget, it's in the Pentagon. And people like Ron Paul and Rand Paul, his son, have called for auditing the Pentagon. Let's see where all this money is going, because it's it's not very transparent.

But they always fear monger. The Pentagon always tries to tell us if we cut their funding, we're going to be less safe, even though a lot of times their interventions are making us less safe. So it is very expensive.

And as we know, when the government spends money, whose money are they spending? Thus, it's our money. So they're spending our money to go do things that are keeping us really vulnerable to foreign attacks. So what Ron Paul and honestly what the founding fathers even called for was a non interventionist foreign policy.

What does that mean? Let's break it down. Non interventionists. So intervene means what intervention comes from the word intervene.

Inter intervening is to get in the middle of something, to meddle in something. So non interventionists would basically be saying, let's not meddle in other places in the world. Let's stay out of it.

So non interventionism has over time by its critics been sometimes called isolationism. So isolationism is what when you are isolated, when you're solitary, you are alone. These things sound similar, right? Isolation, non intervention, both are not meddling in other people's business.

But isolation implies that we don't want anything to do with any other foreign power where non interventionism is different. Non interventionism is saying, yes, let's not go try to install leaders and force, you know, a government that doesn't work for these people based on their traditions or what they want. Let's not do that, but let's trade with them.

I say this a lot, but Frederick Bastiat, the economist, he always said, if goods don't cross borders, armies will. Right. Free markets, trading with people, engaging in commerce that makes everybody friendly because, oh, my goodness, of course, I want to go to this country that has a better, you know, a better technology or something than we have here.

Or they can make it cheaper than than we can here. Trading keeps us friendly. It keeps us friends.

So non interventionists, yeah, we don't want to go bomb other countries for the sake of bombing them because we want to make them better somehow. No, we don't want to do that. But we do want to trade with them.

We want to keep the good relations. An isolationist wouldn't want to do either of those. They wouldn't want to intervene for nation building purposes, but they also wouldn't want to trade.

So the critics of non interventionism will always try to call call us isolationists and try to give it a bad name. And of course they do, because a lot of them, a lot of them are misled in a few few points. Some people don't mind war because they're usually on the winning side.

Right. They're American people and we've never had a real war on our soil. You know, there's things like Pearl Harbor or 9-11 where we've seen the disastrous consequences of war, but it's never been here like it's been in other places.

So it's far removed for them. They don't care. And there's this misconception that it's patriotic to want to go spread our democracy to other people.

That's patriotism. And that's, you know, American exceptionalism. And so there's there's a belief that it's just it's not only not a big deal, that it's what we're supposed to do, that that's what we do as free people.

So you have people that that are OK with war and that's a problem. And then you also have the military industrial complex. You have the people who profit from war, the people who make the bombs and make the missiles.

And you have, you know, Pentagon officials that want to keep their jobs. And so they want to you know, they they want to go and start these wars. And so you have a lot of people that are actually kind of incentivized to want to be war hawks, as we call them.

So during the 2008 presidential season, election season, that's when Ron Paul came on the scene for a lot of us. So he'd been around for a lot longer. But that's when a lot of us started hearing about him.

And for me, you know, the housing crisis had happened. I was wondering what the economy was really all about. I didn't know much.

And I was very pro-Iraq war, very pro-war and terror because 9-11 really scared me as a teenager. But suddenly I started thinking, wait a second, is this actually is this actually helping us? Are we any safer? And, you know, seeing Ron Paul on these debate stages where he was shutting down these war hawks and saying, no, we are less safe. Don't believe them when they tell us we're doing this for freedom or don't believe us or don't believe them when they're saying that this is keeping us safer because it's not.

And his opponents tried to say that he was weak. You know, these non-interventionists are so weak. They're isolationists.

You know, they don't understand anything that, you know, that's a really naive view of the world. It just simply wasn't true. And Ron Paul had another really good point when he was making, you know, this argument that I always loved.

And he's like, OK, our politicians, our government can't even run our own country successfully. Like we're a mess here. Why on earth should we be going into other countries and trying to tell them what to do when we're a wreck? We don't know what we're doing either.

One thing that was really dangerous, I mentioned that part of the problem is when you go into another country, you don't always know what their values are, what their traditions are. And this is really interesting for a couple of reasons. One, we know people who love individualism.

We know, you know, don't hurt people, don't take their stuff. Those are morals that that extend beyond geographical borders. But there are other traditions in other countries and other nations that we don't understand.

And this happened in Vietnam. So when we tried and we, meaning the United States government, not me, not you, when the United States government tried to intervene in Vietnam, which is a heavily Buddhist country, they tried to install, meaning they tried to prop up a Catholic leader. How do you think that was received in a country where everybody was Buddhist? All of a sudden they're putting in a Catholic who is very disconnected from those people.

And there was a rebellion. There was a full on civil war that we meddled in. And we we're to blame for that.

Right. Because we didn't understand the local alliances. We didn't understand.

Sometimes there's like tribal structures in these places. We don't understand their history. And so we're going in there with American knowledge, not realizing that that is that is not the same thing, even though don't hurt people, don't take their stuff.

These are principles that are applied everywhere. There are different cultural traditions like religions that we just don't understand. Even the folklore.

I took a class in college. This is before I dropped out because I talk about that a lot. I took a class in college that was about the history of Vietnam and how there were certain like myths and folklore that really, you know, shaped their principles and morals and that we didn't know anything about it.

And so we went in and we it was the knowledge problem we've talked about with, you know, like said, we can't plan an economy, government can't plan an economy because they don't have all the information. They don't know everything about us. Same is true with, you know, America trying to nation build in countries we simply don't understand.

You know, Ron Paul, we don't even have to sit here and make his arguments for for him because the arguments he's he's already been proven right so many times. And I think Afghanistan is one of the things we can see the most. So when we went into Afghanistan during the war on terror, you know, it was supposed to be for revenge on 9-11, right? That was what that's what was the impetus for getting us in there to fight the terrorists.

But over time, it wasn't just let's fight the terrorists and get the bad guys. It was let's build a new government. You know, it was let's train an Afghan national army.

Let's fund institutions. It became nation building at its core. And we were there for years and years and years.

You know, something Ron Paul always tried to convey is like, OK, we're over here and we're we're trying to build all this infrastructure and everything. But are we building something that the Afghan people actually controlled or are they just borrowing from outside power from us? And then that's not really stable because what happens if we leave? And guess what happened when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan and a lot of people tried to get mad at Biden and say, oh, he shouldn't have pulled us out of Afghanistan so quickly. I don't always sit here and defend Biden.

There's a lot of really bad things he did, but that that really wasn't Biden's fault because the war had already been there. We'd already gone in and tried to nation build and, you know, Biden pulling out in Afghanistan, falling into corruption right after is just a perfect example of you can't have a foreign outside power come in and try to stabilize a country that isn't theirs. The Afghan people are not loyal.

They're not Americans. They don't share a shared value. They are Afghani, like they're they're part of their own country.

And so when you rely on an outside power to come and liberate people, it doesn't work like that because the people of these countries that have corrupt leaders, they have to be responsible for standing up and creating their own government. That's the only way it's going to be lasting. And so that makes me think, let's go back to the example in the beginning where I talked about, like if your mayor was really bad in your city and somebody had to come and, you know, is trying to help you overthrow them, that's going to be more effective if the people rise up and create their own revolution.

What did we do in the American Revolution? It was Americans. Now, we asked France for help towards the end, but it wasn't it was at a be Americans standing up and saying this is not what we want for our futures, for our, you know, posterity. This is not OK.

It has to come from the people itself, not from an outside power. So what we have really done is we put a very small bandaid on Afghanistan that only lasted until we left. And when we were there, we were using American resources.

And it was just it was it was an absolute just waste of wisdom, waste of time, waste of human life and waste of money. Nation building never helps anybody but the people who are lining their pockets or the officials who want more power. So I think we'd be really wise to remember the lessons that Ron Paul taught us, and that is that nation building just doesn't work.

It makes us less safe. It is expensive. It actually serves to harm the people of the countries we're trying to help.

And so whenever we see something come up in the news that might be similar, where you might say like, hey, that kind of sounds like nation building. Let's step back, because one way that we fall into this trap is we think, OK, this leader is really bad. This leader is really awful.

I feel so bad for these people having to live under this leader. OK, maybe that's OK for us to go in then and change everything and save these people. But it's not.

And us not doing that doesn't make us isolationist. And that doesn't mean that we want to see other people of other countries fail or have their rights taken away. It means that we don't have the power to make lasting change.

It has to come from within. So I want you guys to keep that in mind as you hear things that might come up because there will always be threats of nation building. So we will leave it there.

As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.