Debate Held on U.S. Foreign Policy
Irene Wang | Jan 26, 2004 | Comments 2
In more recent times, the topic of the United States’ involvement in international affairs has generated many different viewpoints and heated debates. Students, faculty and community members gathered at the Crystal Cove Auditorium to listen to further discussions on American foreign policy in a debate between Yaron Brook, executive director of The Ayn Rand Institute, and William Schonfeld, a professor of political science on Jan. 21.
Presented by The Ayn Rand Society at UC Irvine, the debate titled, ‘America’s Foreign Policy: Unilateralism vs. Multilateralism (Should We Have Listened to France?),’ was moderated by Jenny Tran, Model United Nations co-president. Ayn Rand Society president Bach Ho, a fourth-year information and computer science major, started off with a brief introduction and set the terms of the debate. Each speaker was given a certain amount of time to speak, a series of rebuttals and a closing statement.
Brook argued that the United States should not send troops to other countries as self-sacrifice but only to countries that threaten the United States’ self-interest. He disagreed to the war in Iraq saying that Iraq did not pose a threat to the United States and terrorist nations such as Iran and Saudi Arabia should be targeted instead. He also said that the United Nations was useless because the United States should not be siding with other nations such as Saudi Arabia and Iran that he considered ‘evil.’
‘America should pursue its own self-interest in its foreign policy,’ Brook said. ‘It is the only standard by which we should determine our foreign policy and our actions in the world is for what is good for the citizens of the United States. And if our own self-defense requires going to war with other countries that the French reject to and the Germans reject to, we need to pursue what is in our own self-interest and disregard their concerns.’
On the other hand, Schonfeld argued that multilateralism should always be used unless the United States is directly threatened, in which case unilateralism can be instituted as a means of defense. Using the war in Iraq as the most recent example, Schonfeld said that when the United Nations, especially France, disagreed with the war in Iraq, the U.S. government ‘decided that was not critical.’ He presented numerous statistics of public opinion polls collected from Western Europe about their positive feelings of the United States. Comparing numbers from 2002 and 2003, the percentage of positive opinions plummeted drastically, arguing that the countries that opposed the United States in United Nation councils only opposed the war in the interest of the United States and not for the sake of disagreeing.
‘Multilateralism is always preferable to unilateralism, but that doesn’t mean that if the nation’s basic interests are threatened it might not act in a unilateral fashion,’ Schonfeld said. ‘And with seeing the passage of time, the interest of the United States would have been better if we had followed a United Nations basic route before getting militarily engaged. Secondly, it would have better served that if the war was over, we have turned over the control of Iraq to the United Nations.’
Although the two debaters disagreed among many topics, both speakers came to an agreement that the war in Iraq was wrong.
However, their reasons differed. Brook opposed the war in Iraq because he believed that the war was not in the self-interest of the United States and that other nations such as Iran posed a larger threat to the United States. Schonfeld did not support the war because he believed it was not the best option for solving the problem and that the United States should have allowed the United Nations to have a bigger role in the whole process.
After the debate ended, there was a Q
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America should just get out of the Middle East. Stop pouring money into another country and reinvest that money into our own country. For all you war mongers out there, how many of you would truly send your own money and own children, or yourselves, into battle? Not many of you.
I agree with Dr. Yaron Brook. The United States should get out of the United Nations. That body puts evil regimes such as Iran — a theocracy that destroys individual rights and consistently tops the State Department’s list of terrorist states — on an equal footing with the United States, a secular constitutional republic that upholds individual rights (if we can keep them) and that is the primary victim of Iranian terrorism. The UN works to give evil regimes such as Iran respectability that it certain does not deserve. America should do everything in its power to destroy Iran, no matter how it impacts other nations, since her citizens’ lives, freedom and prosperity, that is, their individual rights, depend on eliminating this threat. There’s no reason to get the approval for such an attack from other nations.
Were Todd Beamer and the other passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 concerned about how their plan to wrest control of the plane from the terrorists on 9/11 would impact fellow passengers who may have objected to their plan and thus died passively flying into the Capitol or White House? No, Beamer and his supporters identified the threat and went after it in an effort to save their lives. At least they died fighting.
America must act in the same fashion on the world stage, and not appeal to the dictatorship-coddling UN for approval when the facts about Iran’s intend to murder more Americans stares them so clearly in their face.