Combining Popular Threads: Outsourcing and Foreign Policy

Combining Popular Threads: Outsourcing and Foreign Policy

Sowell intertwines the current buzzword "outsourcing" with an analysis of foreign policy.

Outsourcing foreign policy

Spain's decision to turn tail and run, in response to a terrorist bombing, not only tells terrorists how to get their way in the future, it should also tell us about the dangers of outsourcing our foreign policy to our allies or to the United Nations, as so many on the left want us to do. . . .

The sheer repetition of words -- the mantra of "the international community" and the anathema of "unilateral action" -- has become a substitute for examining the hard realities and the track record of those to whom we are supposed to defer when it comes to a mortal threat in a nuclear age.

Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated -- pre-emptively and unilaterally, if necessary.

The so-called "international community" that the left has so long envisioned consists in reality of disunited nations, too many of whom are short-sighted enough to cooperate with terrorists in hopes of deflecting their wrath toward someone else.

Throwing others to the wolves is a strategy that has been tried before. France threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves in 1938 to try to buy off Hitler. Less than two years later, Hitler's armies invaded France -- using, among other things, tanks made in Czechoslovakia.