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What if we closed all of our foreign soil bases and brought all of our troops home? If we slashed our military budget in half and used the saving to pay down the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure at home?
What would the short term and long term ramifications be?
Would the rich countries like Germany, France, Great Britain rebuild their militaries and police their part of the world?
How would China treat their neighbors if not for the US to counter them?
By "isolation," do you also mean cutting off trade? If so, that would be disastrous.
Something else to consider - cutting the military budget in half could potentially be counterproductive and cause more military spending to be necessary eventually. I'm all for cutting military spending - but not in half.
What if we closed all of our foreign soil bases and brought all of our troops home? If we slashed our military budget in half and used the saving to pay down the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure at home?
What would the short term and long term ramifications be?
Would the rich countries like Germany, France, Great Britain rebuild their militaries and police their part of the world?
How would China treat their neighbors if not for the US to counter them?
Could we exist in this world being isolationist?
Sure, we could exist shorter-term: We would probably lose many allies and even gain some enemies. We would run the risk of a Chinese hegemony. We would lose influence on many fronts, including NATO and the UN. We would lose trading partners and a lot of money from exports. I would guess prices would rise, as cheap imports would dry up.
Longer-term: Have you ever been to North Korea?
There is a difference between being Isolationist and learning to mind our own business. We don't need to involve ourselves in every brush fire that pops up. I think it is past due that we look within and start to mend our own fences.
Why do we need 11 carrier battle groups?
Why do we need to involve ourselves in Libya and Syria?
IMO, we should be like Switzerland - neutral in world conflicts, minds their own business, and citizens armed to the teeth so they don't need to spend a ton on a standing army. The country as a result is incredibly prosperous, has a very low crime rate and a high quality of life index. This is called a non-interventionist foreign policy. If they didn't have a tough immigration policy, I would move to there in a heartbeat.
Isolationism implies being like North Korea by sealing off their borders and shoving their head up their own asses. No one wants that.
What if we closed all of our foreign soil bases and brought all of our troops home? If we slashed our military budget in half and used the saving to pay down the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure at home?
What would the short term and long term ramifications be?
Would the rich countries like Germany, France, Great Britain rebuild their militaries and police their part of the world?
How would China treat their neighbors if not for the US to counter them?
Could we exist in this world being isolationist?
OK, I'll pull your finger, but please don't fart, I've seen that one before.
Now, WHAT IF?
Oh just imagine what America would do with all that money we'd be saving!
why heck, we could pay off the national debt, and more!
Long term ramifications? are you kidding? we'd be a stronger nation, economically and defense wise.
we could build up our assault arms so much, nobody, not even china would mess with us, or texas!
We can reduce out military forces and foreign interventions by 80% and still maintain trade with the world. We want their stuff and they want ours so trade would continue. I would expect other trading nations would take over suppressing piracy in various places.
The biggest change I can see is major regional conflicts as the Arabs tried to eliminate Israel and the Persians overran the blasphemous Saudi’s. India might want to reduce the threat from East and West Pakistan. Those are none of our business anyway. Our only concern would be protecting our population from radioactive fallout.
The trade with Asia, except for countervailing tariffs, would remain about the same. So would our oil imports from South America.
The great benefit would be having the money to rebuild our country in a manner that would free us from oil dependence and adverse trade with the Chinese.
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