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A Foreign Policy of Freedom
Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, by Ron Paul


(Click for Amazon book review)

BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org:

This book outlines Ron Paul's foreign policy by re-publishing his key speeches that he made on the floor of the House of Representatives. Paul provides brief commentary on some of the speeches, and he highlights the key concepts, but more valuable is his overall summary of "A Foreign Policy for a Constitutional Republic" as the last chapter (pages 361-371). House speeches are pretty dull even to the policy wonks at OnTheIssues. But this collection is made even duller by its repetitiveness -- because the book only focuses on foreign policy, just about every speech in 2002, for example, is about the lead-up to the Iraq War. When Rep. Paul made these speeches, a month apart from each other, it made sense to repeat the same concepts over again. But in book form, it would be more readable if Rep. Paul selected excerpts instead of printing every speech verbatim from beginning to end. Happily for our readers, we do the excerpting here.

Despite the dullness of this book, it is important because it documents Rep. Paul's position on the Iraq War, from before the war started (when he opposed it), until majority public opinion switched from supporting the war (when Paul still opposed it). The Iraq War is the biggest issue of this presidential campaign, and Paul is the only Republican who's against the war -- so providing this material in detail is certainly relevant to his campaign.

One could view the earlier 150 pages of the book -- spanning the period from 1976 to 2001 -- as documentation that Rep. Paul is consistent in applying his principles of foreign policy to other wars. We'll confirm that he does -- there, now you don't have to read those 150 pages. We fail to see how Rep. Paul's views on Kosovo are relevant to this presidential race, so we omitted them from our excerpts.

The "Paulistas," or Ron Paul fans who heavily populate the Internet, might be the only audience who enjoy this book, although it says little that has not been said on the campaign trail. Paulistas might prefer Paul's other books, which are not only shorter, but are actually written as books instead of a collection of speeches. The two that we've excerpted are Paul's book on economics, Gold, Peace, and Prosperity, and on Constitutional issues, Freedom Under Siege.

-- Jesse Gordon, jesse@OnTheIssues.org, December 2007