This person clearly doesn’t understand the philosophy of non-interventionism, at least as I see it.

Non-interventionism seeks peaceful relationships with all. It works to avoid or reduce any attacks from any side, while allowing all sides to maintain a position of strength in their own affairs. Similarly, the Sexton Doctrine’s “Absorb the first blow” seeks to avoid or minimize any attack.

Instead of a massive offensive military designed to fight vast wars over a period of decades, non-interventionism and the Sexton Doctrine use a military that is more focused on intelligence, rapid surgical strikes, and superior defense.

The key here is intelligence. The tagline for GI Joe is “knowing is half the battle”. I hold that the more you know, knowing can be 90% of the battle. The better our intelligence gathering and dissemination networks are, the more accurately we can know exactly when a new threat is in the works. This does NOT mean that we should employ methods such as torture, as there are far better means of obtaining critical information – including the age old “standard” espionage of either having agents infiltrate groups or covertly bartering with an existing member of the group for the information we need.

Once we know that an attack is imminent, we can at that point employ rapid surgical strikes to eliminate the specific threat. These teams should rely on the intelligence available and have at their disposal the fastest, most precise, and most covert weapons available. They should target the most crucial points of the threat, eliminate them, and leave as little other damage as possible. When truly effective, these teams would never have been known to exist, but all of a sudden their target will come up destroyed.

Relying on intelligence and rapid surgical strike teams will only get us so far in the real world however, as no intelligence system or strike team is fool proof or all knowing. That is where superior defensive forces, strategies, and technologies come to bear.

One old maxim is that the best defense is a strong offense. In matters of conflict, I hold a slightly modified view of that – the best defense is a strong offensive force intentionally held in a defensive position. This is why you don’t hear me calling for a scale down in the overall military force of the US. I agree that we do not make America safer by scaling back our military’s strength. Where I disagree with interventionists is that I believe that strength is best applied as a defensive force surrounding a much more compact area (specifically, the US itself) rather than as an offensive force that spans the globe.

As the Germans learned on both fronts of WWII, and we Americans learned in the Pacific as we drove closer and closer to the Japanese home islands, militaries – and more precisely, the men and women who make up those militaries – fight much fiercer and much more effectively the closer they are fighting to their own homes. The Germans never landed a single batallion on Great Britain, even when they had complete control of the French side of the English Channel. While they were able to push into Russian territory, that was an overbite and spelled the beginning of the end for them, as the Russians repelled them all the way back to Berlin. In our war against the Japanese, one reason for pushing the use of this new uber-bomb we were developing was because the military leaders knew too well just how ferocious the fighting would be on the Japanese home islands, and that it would cost thousands more American lives. So we used a weapon that had never been used before – or since. The atomic bomb.

Even right now in Iraq and Aghanistan, our soldiers are fighting thousands of miles from home against forces that could never reach those homes. The forces we are fighting against are, by and large, fighting for their own homes right now against a force they see as oppressive.

But if we pull back and set up a true defensive perimeter around our own homes, we pull back to a position of strength and core motivation while at the same time decreasing the enemies motivation, as they are no longer fighting for their homes. We make America safer both ways of looking at it! Instead of a large force spread over a large area, we concentrate that large force on a very (relatively) compact area – making it MUCH more effective.

The final benefit of keeping the military at the same levels while simply re-tasking it as a defensive force?

Remember the second part of the Sexton Doctrine -”make DANG SURE you deliver the LAST blow”? If an attack IS, in some incredibly remote way, able to defeat every single defensive measure we have and actually strike a blow in the US, that offensive force that we’ve intentionally kept as a defensive force?

It can rapidly be activated as an overwhelming offensive force once again, for the specific task of making dang sure we deliver the last blow.

As our nation has intervened, the world around us has started to get used to it.  This isn’t necessarily a good thing.  When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the world looked to us to liberate it.  I personally have no problem with intervening to free a conquored nation.  What happened as a result was our continued presence in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s most holy city, Mecca.  This, and not our freedoms, are the reason why we were attacked on 9/11.

Our intervention caused this, and other attacks are caused by not intervening in cases with Israel.  Frankly, we can’t win in this case.  It’s damned if we do, damned if we don’t.  So where do we draw the line?

We have, against the advice of several of our founding fathers, found ourselves entangled in multiple alliances and treaties.  For better or worse, we’re in them.  I believe that it is the responsibility of every sentient entity on Earth to fulfill it’s obligations to the best of it’s ability.  For better or worse, we are a part of NATO.  And for better or worse, we have obligated ourselves to help protect Japan and South Korea, who lie directly in the line of sight with North Korea.

North Korea is ultimately saber rattling, this I believe very strongly.  We have sent “aid” to them every time they have done this in the past, and they know it.  They know we don’t want another Korean War, and they’re right.  But I’m afraid that ignoring them won’t quite do it.

You see, we have thousands of troops currently in harms way due to our obligations in South Korea and Japan.  Ignoring them won’t really work ultimately.  Instead, we do need to engage them in dialog.  And here’s what I think we should tell them:

If you even think of firing a nuclear weapon, we will obliterate North Korea from the earth so completely that even the history books will just have burn marks where you used to be mentioned.

One of the great “knowns” in strategic circles is that the United States alone has the ability to destroy the entire planet with our nuclear arsenal.  So let’s remind North Korea that we are capable of doing so, but have chosen not to since World War II even though it might have ended the Korean and Vietnam Wars (in all fairness, it probably would have started a nuclear war with the USSR, but still…).

North Korea is currently testing a weapon that may be able to reach United States territory.  While it would hardly reach our beloved Southwest Georgia; Alaska, Hawaii, and the west coast aren’t so fortunate.  We must make it clear to North Korea that their saber rattling days are over.  We won’t rise to their bait any longer, but will meet any act of force with such a level of retaliation that not even the cockroaches will survive.

I feel that the time for being completely isolationist militarily has passed.  We’ve made our bed, now we just have to lie in it.  Intervention must be a last resort in any instance, but we must fulfill our obligations.  Failure to do so may cost us American lives…a cost I’m not ready to pay.

Cato has a couple of excellent articles about what is going on and what we should do about it – we should be realistic and restrained, but basically ignore them. Personally, I completely concur with these assessments.

Let me further note that we’ve basically done the exact same things in recent years. We’ve worked on new nukes – via our mini-nukes/’bunker buster’ nukes, we’ve tested all kinds of new weapons – many of which are already on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we even said that we are no longer bound by a treaty signed decades ago – in our case, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The difference in North Korea and the United States of America?

North Korea at least does a lot of talk, but then only defends its own borders.

The US does a lot of talk – and then goes out and ‘polices’ (aka ‘bullies’) the rest of the world into doing what it wants.

Now, I am COMPLETELY for having the strongest, most capable military force on the planet. But I do NOT accept the fallacy that ‘we have to fight them there so that we don’t have to fight them here’. How about we just leave everybody alone? Keep the strongest, most capable military on the planet as a DEFENSE force. Make the message loud and clear: do what you want in your own country, but the instant you attack American soil, your country will cease to exist. No more of this ‘nation building’ or ‘peace keeping’ crap.

And I also don’t buy this ‘protect American interests’ or ‘protect American citizens’ crap either. With regard to ‘interests’, it is rightfully the job of private security organizations to protect businesses/ships/etc when outside the borders and territorial waters of the US. With American citizens, the official policy of this – or any – nation should be that the moment an individual leaves the country, his or her personal protection is his or her own responsibility, and not that of the nation itself.

And let’s be honest, this isn’t a new concept. In fact, it is centuries old – castles anyone? Indeed, ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘nation building’ are the new concepts, and let’s face it, they ain’t working out so well.

Again, I COMPLETELY support having the strongest, most capable military on the planet. I just think they should be a defense force rather than a ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘nation building’ one. This, to me, is the heart of non-interventionism.

So yes, we need to be ‘realistic and restrained’ with North Korea. We need to ignore them.

But we also need to make sure they – and every other foreign nation – get one message crystal clear:

We’ll leave you alone as long as you leave us alone. But if you poke the sleeping giant, expect to get squashed.