Ron Paul - The Revolution: A Manifesto, pp 9-10.

Our Founding Fathers gave us excellent advice on foreign policy.
Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, called for "peace,
commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances
with none." George Washington, several years earlier, took up this
theme in his Farewell Address. "Harmony, liberal intercourse with all
nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest," he
maintained. "But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and
impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or
preferences." Washington added:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in
extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little
political connection as possible.... Why quit our own to stand upon
foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part
of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European
ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

Unfortunately, we have spent the past century spurning this sensible
advice. If the Founders' advice is acknowledged at all, it is
dismissed on the grounds that we no longer live in their times. The
same hackneyed argument could be used against any of the other
principles the Founders gave us. Should we give up the First Amendment
because times have changed? How about the rest of the Bill of Rights?
It's hypocritical and childish to dismiss certain founding principles
simply because a convenient rationale is needed to justify foolish
policies today. The principles enshrined in the Constitution do not
change. If anything, today's more complex world cries out for the
moral clarity of a noninterventionist foreign policy.

It is easy to dismiss the noninterventionist view as the quaint
aspiration of men who lived in a less complicated world, but it's not
so easy to demonstrate how our current policies serve any national
interest at all. Perhaps an honest examination of the history of
American interventionism in the twentieth century, from Korea to
Vietnam to Kosovo to the Middle East, would reveal that the Founding
Fathers foresaw more than we think.

Anyone who advocates the noninterventionist foreign policy of the
Founding Fathers can expect to be derided as an isolationist. I myself
have never been an isolationist. I favor the very opposite of
isolation: diplomacy, free trade, and freedom of travel. The real
isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on
countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the
internal and foreign policies of their leaders. The real isolationists
are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy,
rather than seeking change through diplomacy, engagement, and by
setting a positive example. The real isolationists are those who
isolate their country in the court of world opinion by pursuing
needless belligerence and war that have nothing to do with legitimate
national security concerns.
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