Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="soberups" data-source="post: 1194081" data-attributes="member: 14668">To those who say that the USA should stop acting as the world police;I agree with you to a point, but it is worth remembering that in many cases, the reason we choose to maintain military bases in other nations is because those nations (Japan and South Korea being prime examples) are under direct threat from a nuclear-armed enemy and rather than trigger a regional arms race by developing their own nukes they rely upon us for such protection. If we feel the time has come to &quot;bring our troops home&quot; thats fine, but we cant then expect those nations to continue their policy of not possessing nuclear weapons of their own. Same thing goes with chemical weapons; 192 nations worldwide have signed a treaty outlawing the posession or use of chemical weapons and part of what makes that treaty work is the implied threat of military consequences (imposed by us or another superpower) against the handful of nations (Syria being one) that have chosen not to abide by the treaty. The case can be made that if the nations of the world overwhelmingly choose to ban chemical weapons then someone somewhere needs to be willing to kick some ass when that ban is violated; otherwise the treaty isnt worth the paper its written on.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="soberups, post: 1194081, member: 14668"] To those who say that the USA should stop acting as the world police; I agree with you to a point, but it is worth remembering that in many cases, the reason we choose to maintain military bases in other nations is because those nations (Japan and South Korea being prime examples) are under [I]direct threat from a nuclear-armed enemy [/I]and rather than trigger a regional arms race by developing their own nukes they rely upon us for such protection. If we feel the time has come to "bring our troops home" thats fine, but we cant then expect those nations to continue their policy of not possessing nuclear weapons of their own. Same thing goes with chemical weapons; 192 nations worldwide have signed a treaty outlawing the posession or use of chemical weapons and part of what makes that treaty work is the implied threat of military consequences (imposed by us or another superpower) against the handful of nations (Syria being one) that have chosen [I]not [/I]to abide by the treaty. The case can be made that if the nations of the world overwhelmingly choose to ban chemical weapons then someone somewhere needs to be willing to kick some ass when that ban is violated; otherwise the treaty isnt worth the paper its written on. [/QUOTE]

Verification