The wire reports out of Sudan read like a dispatch from the gates of hell. More than 300 souls snuffed out in a flash of heat and shrapnel, incinerated by military drones that leveled a fuel market and tore through a truck carrying mourners to a funeral. It is a slaughter of staggering proportions, the kind of raw, indiscriminate butchery that ought to sicken any decent human being. But as the smoke clears over the burning diesel and the dead, a familiar script is already being dusted off in the mahogany-paneled think tanks along the Potomac. We have seen this movie before, and we know exactly how the high priests of globalism want it to end: with American money, American promises, and eventually, American sons deployed to patch up a fracture line older than our Republic.
Make no mistake about what is happening in the Horn of Africa. This is not a struggle between Jeffersonian democrats and the forces of darkness; it is a ferocious, tribal dogfight for raw power, smuggling routes, gold, and fuel, waged between rival warlords who view their own countrymen as mere kindling. High-tech drones, manufactured thousands of miles away by global arms syndicates and paid for with dirty cash, are raining fire down on open-air bazaars and dirt roads. It is the ugliest face of modern globalism, where advanced military hardware flows freely across porous borders into the hands of ruthless despots, while the civilized world wrings its hands and pretends to be shocked.
Already, the foreign policy establishment in Washington—that stubborn, bipartisan blob that has never met a foreign quagmire it didn’t want to subsidize—is beginning to whisper the usual platitudes. They talk of moral obligations, of defending international norms, of multilateral aid packages and peacekeeping frameworks. They will tell us that what happens in the Sudanese bush directly threatens the security of a family living in Kokomo, Indiana, or a welder working second shift in Steubenville, Ohio. It is a lie. It has been a lie since the tragedy in Mogadishu thirty years ago, and it remains a lie today.
Step out onto the floor of an American machine shop, look a machinist in the eye, and ask him if his tax dollars ought to be funneled into the bottomless pit of African factional warfare. He is paying four dollars a gallon for diesel, watching his local bridge crumble, and wondering if his plant will survive the next wave of cheap foreign imports. The working men and women of this country have carried the burden of global empire on their aching backs for half a century. They built the armaments, paid the bills, and gave their children to foreign battlefields, only to watch their own industrial towns hollowed out by the very elites who lectured them about global citizenship.
The war in Sudan is fundamentally an extractive brawl. It is about who controls the diesel pumps, the transit lines, and the mineral wealth to feed global markets. The international trade apparatus loves to preach borderless commerce and global brotherhood right up until the loitering munitions start dropping on the supply chain. When the carnage arrives, they demand that sovereign Western nations foot the bill to clean up the mess. We must refuse the call. Compassion for the dead does not require our nation to sign a blank check or commit our prestige to an unresolvable feud.
Pat Buchanan spent decades warning this country against the siren song of imperial overstretch, reminding us that we cannot be the world’s policeman, sheriff, and social worker all at once. If the tragic slaughter of 300 mourners and merchants in Sudan proves anything, it is the total futility of outside meddling in regions defined by centuries of internal bloodlust. The weapons used in this attack were paid for by the international market, yet the victims were ordinary people caught in the crossfire of a resource war they could not escape.
The United States must learn to mind its own business. We ought to grieve for the innocents burned alive in that market, for their deaths are an affront to God and humanity. But the best service we can render to the world is to keep our own house in order. That means securing our own borders, rebuilding our own productive capacity, drilling our own energy, and resolutely refusing to plunge our country into every foreign charnel house that flashes across the morning news wire. The American republic was made for free men, not for endless imperial crusades across the burning sands of Africa.