The Strait of Malacca is the 500-mile-long shipping lane that allows China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and Europe to trade with each other. Half of the world’s oil and 40% of all world trade pass through the strait. The United States Navy patrols the Strait of Malacca.
The Strait of Hormuz separates the Arabian Peninsula from Iran by just two miles. Some 20 percent of the entire world’s oil production is shipped through that tiny opening. Iran can disrupt it, cutting off the Far East and India from Middle Eastern oil. Once again, it is our navy that guarantees free passage through the strait.
Free shipping and commercial passage through these waterways are important to the United States. They are American interests, and those interests don’t change. Presidential administrations and foreign potentates change, but American interests don’t.
Back in 1801, state-sanctioned Arab pirates harassed American shipping in the Mediterranean Sea, took American prisoners and demanded “tribute” from the new United States. President Thomas Jefferson ordered the nascent U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to attack the prates’ base at Tripoli. They did. And carried the day.
A hundred years after Jefferson ordered Marines to the shores of Tripoli, newly-elected President Teddy Roosevelt landed Marines in Morocco to force the release of a single American hostage. It was the “Perdicaris Affair,” in which a single American hostage was an American interest.
Visits by U.S. armed forces to all parts of the world were not unusual before Dec. 7, 1941. However, a streak of isolationism grew in the United States after World War I and during the Great Depression. But that 1930s American isolationism disappeared with the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Since the end of the Cold War and the former Soviet Union in 1989, however, American isolationism has experienced a resurrection.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul and his father, ersatz Presidential candidate Ron Paul; Fox commentators Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan; and other conservative media types are championing a return to 1930s-like isolationism. President Donald Trump has some isolationist leanings as well.
Joining “conservative isolationists” on the left are Sen. Bernie Sanders and his progressive movement, as well as wannabe Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a Congresswoman from Hawaii.
American troops are currently deployed to Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa as they have been since World War II ended in 1945.
The Navy and Marines are constantly patrolling in the Mediterranean Sea, and a naval flotilla led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is currently in the Arabian Sea.
U.S. ships ply waters that the People’s Republic of China claim as its own, chase down and kill Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa. intercept cocaine-laden boats sailing from South America, and seize outlaw ships evading American sanctions on North Korea.
Besides entering almost every nook and cranny of the world to project American power, we also stand ready to help — when earthquakes shatter communities, when tsunamis hit vulnerable coastlines, and when hurricanes and cyclones demolish nations.
American interests are more than business and commerce; they are the lives, liberty and ways of life for millions of people, everywhere, including promoting freedom and the desire for freedom.
Those who decry protecting or projecting American interests beyond the Mexican and Canadian borders are short-sighted. Yes, presidents have made mistakes and there are episodes that besmirch the United States, but Jefferson, Roosevelt and every other president who has ordered armed Americans into other countries knew or thought they knew American interests were endangered.
Buchanan, Carlson, Sanders, the Paul family and the rest of the current crop of American isolationists insult our history, our ideas, our destiny and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a political consultant and author of the new book White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) & Mexicans. His work has appeared in the New American News Service of the New York Times Syndicate.
