Since World War II, a touchstone of American conservatism has been the defense of freedom. The freedoms of others were regarded as essential to secure and enjoy our own. ~Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly

Via Scoblete

The first sentence is debatable, but there is something to it in general terms. If the “defense of freedom” means what they say it does in the next sentence, this has not been a “touchstone” of American conservatism since WWII. At best, it has been a faddish idea indulged by some conservatives during the last ten to twenty years, and before that it was not an idea held by many conservatives in the United States. It reached its peak in popularity on the right around the time of Bush’s Second Inaugural, and has steadily lost support since then. Of course, the authors aren’t really talking about the freedoms of others or American freedoms. What they want to keep in place is an America that has a “robust” role in the world, and they don’t really care what it costs in dollars or American liberties.

One of the problems with the idea that the “freedoms of others” are “essential to secure and enjoy our own” is that there’s simply no reason to believe that it is true. If people in China or Iran or Burma were to become significantly more free politically than they are today, American freedoms would be no more and no less secure. On the whole, American freedoms are not under threat from foreign governments and non-state actors, and foreign governments and non-state actors cannot significantly affect our freedoms. What can threaten those freedoms is the belief that we must give them up for the sake of an elusive security against over-hyped, exaggerated or non-existent threats.

What is essential to securing and enjoying our own freedoms is a healthy wariness of and opposition to concentrated and unchecked power at home. There are few better examples of concentrated and unchecked power than the warfare and security states constructed for the sake of “defending freedom.” Many actual American constitutional liberties have been compromised, undermined or gutted by this supposed freedom-defending apparatus, which makes the claim that our large military and security establishments are primarily dedicated to defending freedom a bit hard to take. Pletka and Donnelly have resorted to this misleading freedom language because they want to make sure that the funding for the warfare and security state is not jeopardized in all of the budget-cutting excitement that they think might ensue next year. The main thing to understand is that their argument has nothing to do with fidelity to conservative principles or the protection of American freedom. It is focused solely on perpetuating an unnecessary, unaffordable American hegemony in international affairs that forces us to sacrifice liberty and security and the fiscal health of the nation while nonetheless failing to put American interests overseas first.