America needs to ditch nation-state cronyism

downloading all the costs of armed conflict onto the average citizen. How many patriots have lost their lives in foreign battles that have resulted in little more than a change from one foreign leader to another who better serves the interests of those who pushed for the war in the first place?

Why do some people in Washington believe that capitalism needs war as an entree? President Donald Trump is a supporter of the free market, and it’s refreshing to see a president practice the capitalist doctrine that America has long preached.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment has a history of favoring certain nationstates that have managed to buy off American interests.

Why, for example, has China failed to buy the Trump administration’s political goodwill despite holding a massive amount of U.S. debt bonds? China simply doesn’t have the same history of buying off Beltway players to do its bidding. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel have long been mucking around in the Middle East and trying to drag America into regional conflicts for their own selfish reasons.

Instead of telling these countries to deal with their own backyard problems, which have nothing to do with the interests of the average American, the world’s foremost superpower is prostrating itself in front of these Middle Eastern money states. And for what? If Saudi Arabia is such a great ally, why can’t it convince its little brother, Pakistan, to get a better handle on its Taliban proxies?

What have these countries done for America lately to have so much control over U.S. foreign policy? In her recent speech, Haspel singled out Iran for “propping up the government on Syrian President Bashar Assad, to expand its influence in Baghdad and to back the Houthis in Yemen.” Why aren’t Saudi Arabia and its allies mentioned in the same breath for their opposing roles in the exact same theaters of war?

If America really wants to bring freemarket capitalism and a level playing field for fair trade to the rest of the world, it needs to implement policies that ditch nation-state cronyism.