Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 375. Thanks for joining us.

So I want to talk a little bit about foreign affairs and our military. The occasion that I'd like to use, the launching point rather that I'd like to use here, would be the raids that are currently

being perpetrated on the Houthis in Yemen. So the Houthis, who are a proxy for the Iranians,

have been firing on shipping that has been going by Yemen there.

A large percentage of the world's maritime traffic goes through there.

And the Houthis have been sort of helping themselves firing on merchant ships and harassing them and doing that sort of thing.

Shortly after Trump took office, we began launching a series of very destructive raids

on the Houthi's military capacity and have been blowing lots of stuff up.

Now, as soon as we, this is military action, it's overseas. It is what some people

would call adventurism or, you know, cowboy diplomacy or cowboy, you know, that firing off your

six guns. Well, I want to make a distinction here, and there's a fundamental distinction to be made.

What the president has authorized here has nothing whatever to do with nation building.

So I would make a distinction between military action that protects, directly protects,

American interests overseas and as a side consequence, as a side blessing, protects the interests

of everyone else that is trying to use that shipping lane. So other merchant countries are having their

shipping protected too, but what we're doing is we're protecting our merchants. Now,

there is no attempt being made or contemplated that I'm aware of, of going into Yemen or overthrowing the

government of Yemen or writing a constitution for the Houthis to then abide by, that would be

what I would call nation building. So our adventurism in Afghanistan, our problems in Iraq after the Iraq war, those sorts of endeavors are endeavors to sort of bring the American way, bring democracy to the world at the point of a gun.

We're going to simply save the world.

Or as Woodrow Wilson would put it, make the world safe for democracy.

Well, that, I think, is none of our business.

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