re: Rand Paul is Pro-Israel

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Why would I want to read/listen to an isolationist's take on what I already know?

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Wolf Blitzer: One final question, Congressman, before I let you go. In the past I’ve called you an isolationist, but I get hammered by your supporters out there …

Ron Paul: Good.

Wolf Blitzer: … when they write to me and they say, “Ron Paul is not an isolationist, he’s a non-interventionist”. Tell our viewers right now, once and for all, the difference between an isolationist and a non-interventionist.

Ron Paul: An isolationist is a protectionist that builds walls around their country, they don’t like the trade, they don’t like to travel about the world, and they like to put sanctions on different countries. So some of the people who call me that, are actually much more in favor of sanctions and limited trade, they’re the ones who don’t want to trade with Cuba and they want to put sanctions on anybody who blinks their eye at them. And yet, the opposite is what we believe in, we believe Nixon did the right thing by opening up trade doors with China, because that is when we quit killing each other and we are more at peace, which we better be, because they have become our banker. So non-intervention is quite a bit different since what the founders advised was to get along with people, trade with people, and to practice diplomacy, rather than having this militancy of telling people what to do and how to run the world and building walls around our own country. That is isolationism, it’s a far cry from what we believe in.

Wolf Blitzer: And just to be precise, you want to bring all the U.S. troops home, not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from Germany, Japan, South Korea and everyplace else around the world. Is that right?

Ron Paul: Yea, because I believe in national defense and our first responsibility, and probably one of the major responsibilities of the federal government, is the national defense. And fighting these wars does not help us, I mean, getting bogged down in Afghanistan brought the Soviet Union to its knees, and is bringing us to our knees, too. We’ve been there for ten years and it’s contributing to this huge deficit that we have. Those wars over there have contributed 4 trillion dollars worth of debt in the last 10 years. So yea, I want to bring them home, and I think we’ll be stronger for it, I think we’ll have a stronger national defense and we’ll have a lot stronger economy. If we’re serious about straightening this mess up, we have to deal with foreign policy as well monetary policy and fiscal policy and tax policy.

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