President Trump, under his duteous role as commander-in-chief, recently ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian government airbase in response to a chemical attack by Syrian President Bashar Assad onto unknowing Syrian rebels. This abrupt military strike on the part of Trump brings to light the first few steppingstones as to what a Trump foreign policy will look like for the next four years — a Trump Doctrine, if you will.
What happens from here is open to anyone’s insightful interpretation to geopolitical affairs. Many say this was merely a symbolic gesture on behalf of the Trump administration, with no substantive end goal. Others are conjecturing a new hawkish approach to foreign policy that is derived from the assumption that perhaps Trump’s moral views have been elevated by the enshrining powers of the presidency.
Nevertheless, the one interpreting idea that should always remain valid, is the United States’ continuing moral affirmation to global interventionist principles. The idea is that the duty of the United States military, along with defending its motherland, should always be to maintain a proactive presence in foreign affairs.
This, of course, is a deeply unsettling topic among many Americans with varying degrees of support and opposition within every political ideology. Are there daunting costs to military interventionism in the form of honorable, yet willing, American lives? Certainly. Are there monetary and international prestige costs? Without a doubt. Are there also rewarding humanitarian outcomes, such as liberating thousands of people from the hands of tyranny? Absolutely.
Be that as it may, whether or not you choose to believe in military interventionism, the truth of the matter, is that the U.S. military is the greatest fighting power this planet has ever seen. It is the mightiest, most advanced military force ever created by civilization, and to not use it for the good of humanity is a grave mistake. Its global presence should be perpetually retained, and any lack thereof would be equally fatal.
Consider yourself for a moment as the man, woman or child entrenched in such a perilous situation. Is a prolonged and wicked death by a chemical agent not worth curtailing? Does the gradual deprivation of human life through a period of anguishing convulsions, trembling loss of bodily functions and petrifying asphyxiation not violate the sanctity of human life? If human life is truly the ultimate source of value, then is this notion not worth defending?
The idea behind human universality — a quality that involves all people — is that a person’s self-governing body is their castle, it is their bastion, and to attack it, by natural law, is an illegal act. No person, nor government, has any right to deprive any sovereign being of life, liberty and property, which is an ideal that Assad has infringed on numerous times.
The struggle to preserve human life, wherever it may reside, should not be a discriminatory choice. We can all agree that tyranny should be abated wherever it may reside. This, however, is not to suggest that war should ever be romanticized by the U.S., but there is no denying that every time the U.S. takes a lax approach to foreign policy, malignant forces do eventually establish themselves as hostile agents to both their host nations and the U.S.
I believe that Trump, in his short time in office, has been exposed to the actualities that Earth breeds. He may, at last, have realized the exceptional role that the United States plays, and the monumental opportunity it has to achieve human prosperity where none could previously have existed.
Source: Tucson
