Bob Wright writes that Ron Paul’s greatest contribution as a candidate has been the introduction of moral imagination into foreign policy discourse:

I’ve long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of “moral imagination”–the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.

If a lack of moral imagination is indeed the core problem with America’s foreign policy, and Ron Paul is unique among presidential candidates in trying to fight it, I think you have to say he’s doing something great, notwithstanding the many non-great and opposite-of-great things about him (and notwithstanding the fact that he has in the past failed to extend moral imagination across all possible borders).

It says something about Paul’s non-interventionism that he is “unique among presidential candidates” in trying to see these things as other nations would, and it tells us something even more important about the various kinds of internationalism that their adherents usually do not try to do this. Some find the attempt to be offensive, and reduce it to being nothing than “blaming America first,” when it is far more often a matter of refusing to demonize another state and/or people. Part of what Paul and other non-interventionists try to do is to hold political actors accountable for what they do. This usually starts with the mistaken actions of our own government because these are actions that we as citizens don’t support, and because we have a responsibility as citizens to correct what is done in our name.