https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/why_preserve_a_world_order_without_freedom.html
Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants more money and weapons for Ukraine. Recently standing in Kyiv alongside two (other?) Democrat senators — one who repeatedly lied about his service in Vietnam and another who repeatedly lied about President Trump being a Russian spy — Graham demanded American tanks on the ground immediately. “World order is at stake!” he declared. Something serious must be at stake over there; having thrown over a hundred billion dollars to a nation that was known universally as one of the most corrupt in the world before Russia crossed its borders last year, the U.S. government has become “pot committed” to a European war, whether financially struggling Americans care or not.
Just what is this “world order” that keeps Ol’ Lindsey up at night? Surely he means some combination of American hegemony, military dominance, dollar-denominated financial supremacy, and command over the vaunted “rules-based international system” so-called Western leaders love to defend. You never hear anything about the importance of defending Western rights and liberties, though, do you? Senator Graham-nesty isn’t worried about protecting America’s borders. He says absolutely nothing about securing Westerners’ freedoms from threats of tyranny. Why?
Because America has relinquished its status as “leader of the free world.” That is not because dementia-addled Joe Biden is merely a figurehead under the unelected Deep State’s control. It is because there is no “free world” right now — at least not within the jurisdiction of political governments. The political persecution of J6 protesters for “thought crimes,” the authoritarian COVID-1984 lockdowns and mandates, and the confirmation through the “Twitter Files” that the U.S. government is heavily invested in censorship and public manipulation all make this damning statement soberingly clear.
Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.” American independence and the U.S. Constitution embraced this principle. The “American experiment” was not devoted to creating a vast administrative State in which the expertise and benevolence of “public servants” would usher in a future Utopia. “Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness,” Ludwig von Mises observed, “no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.” Arguing otherwise has been the fool’s gold of both idealists and tyrants for millennia. “Freedom is indivisible,” Mises argued. “As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.” The American system broke with tyrannies of the past, and for doing so, an unelected, mercurial, deceptive, and vicious Deep State has spent decades breaking the American system.