30-Year Mistake

Ron Paul's blog on Eqypt this week, entitled "Our 30-year Mistake" caught my eye. I have always been a little uncertain about his foreign policy opinions and thought he was wrong most of the time, but this paragraph kind of turned on a light bulb for me:

We are in fact more isolated from Egypt now than ever, because the regime we propped up appears to be falling. We have isolated ourselves from the Egyptian people by propping up their government, as we isolate ourselves from Tunisians, Israelis, and other recipients of our foreign aid. Their resentment of our interventionist policies makes us less safe, because we lose our authority to conduct meaningful diplomacy when unpopular regimes fall overseas. We also radicalize those who resented our support for past regimes. 

Let us hope for a more prosperous and peaceful era for the Egyptians, and let us learn the lessons of our thirty-year Egyptian mistake.

Explained this way, I see the error of us getting involved in another country's business. I mean, most of the world thinks Obama is a great president who will turn America into what they would like us to be. If other countries were openly financially propping his administration up, there is a great part of our population that might resent those countries. That would be a negative for those countries. So I see now that as we step into another country's internal struggle and choose a side, we only create more enemies for ourselves in a region of the world where we don't need more enemies.