The United States was founded on the principle of a non-interventionist foreign policy, one in which the federal government does not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” That was the title of a speech delivered to Congress by John Quincy Adams on the Fourth of July, 1821, in which Adams summarized America’s founding foreign-policy principle of non-interventionism.

Adams observed that there are lots of monstrous conditions under which people around the world suffer — tyranny, oppression, war, revolution, starvation. It was not the the role of the U.S. government, however, to go abroad and save people from such horrors.

Modern-day Republicans and Democrats have abandoned America’s founding foreign-policy principle of non-interventionism in favor of empire and foreign interventionism. Military bases in hundreds of countries around the world and all over the United States. Coups. Regime-change operations. Invasions. Endless wars of aggression and occupations. Torture. Rendition. Foreign aid to dictators. Sanctions and embargoes. The infliction of massive death, suffering, and destruction.

Foreign interventionism has also given rise to the threat of anti-American terrorism, which U.S. officials have used to justify their “war on terrorism,” which, in turn, has been used to destroy the liberties and privacy of the American people, such as with the TSA, Homeland Security, USA PATRIOT Act, mass surveillance, torture, assassination, indefinite detention, and denial of due process of law.

Meanwhile, America’s massive warfare state, combined with the massive welfare state, continues to head the country toward bankruptcy through the out-of-control federal spending and debt needed to fund this monstrosity.

The only solution to this morass is to restore America’s founding principle of non-interventionism and, at the same time, liberate the American people to interact freely with the people of the world.