Ron Paul is a man with a small but constant and passionate fanbase. There are many reasons for this, some good, some bad – he is one of the few candidates to openly advocate liberalisation of drug law, for example, and in general his supporters, charitably, tend towards the naive on subjects such as his apparent racism. But one of the reasons for his enduring appeal is his advocacy for a military isolationism. In a country that has been suckered into too many wars of choice since 1950, a candidate promising a return to the good old days, when wars were fought only in the national defence and politics ended at the water’s edge, has a certain appeal. It even has an element of historical rigour to it; the great long-lived empires of the past have tended to shy away from ambitious rhetoric of global responsibility, fighting wars only to protect their back yards or expand them. President Obama was elected party on the basis of a similar aspiration.

Paul argues that America’s twentieth century saw its competitiveness and prestige tarnished through a series of ideologically incoherent, politically unnecessary wars, which also happened to be massively expensive and left the country’s political class in hock to its military industrial complex. He doesn’t just want to pull US troops out of its remaining one-and-a-half wars; he wants to root the military out of government payrolls entirely, proposing to shut bases from Germany to Korea, ending foreign aid entirely (which of course plays into a broader political point, part of which is that much of that aid goes to countries who simply use it to buy American kit), and reducing both economic and military support to Israel. The last paragraph tells you one important thing about Ron Paul: namely, that he will never be the President of the United States, or even a nominee for that office. Nevertheless his ideas resonate, both with young libertarians and rightward-leaning centrists. They have a long tradition in the US – military intervention is a post-war innovation, and it has been noted that Paul’s policy really only echoes those of the country’s thirteenth President Millard Fillmore.

But Fillmore lived in simpler times. Do the politics of a complex, interconnected world allow for the isolation of its greatest power?

The short answer is probably no. Obama has found disentanglement harder than his campaign rhetoric suggested; the Afghan war drags on, drone bombings have massively increased and offences against human decency, such as corpse desecration and Guantanamo Bay, remain as problematic as they were under President Bush. This is partly a reflection of the world in which we live. Retired Colonel Pat Lang today asked

It is not clear to me what Ron Paul’s actual position is. Someone should ask him what he would do if the Iranians actually attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz to international maritime traffic. What would he do as president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces?

Presumably Paul’s counter would be that, by pulling its military out of Iran’s vicinity and reducing its support for Israel, the US would reduce tensions and improve its leverage sufficiently that such a situation would be less likely to arise. But this is optimistic, not least because the US is hardly alone amongst Iran’s agitators (Britain is arguably even less popular in Iran than the US). Disrupting oil traffic is an extreme case, but the truth is that the US is implicated, either directly by dint of supplied equipment, economically by dint of strategic interests, or morally by way of training or political support, in more or less every conflict that could conceivably take place. The international system is immensely complex. The US can not extricate itself from the web of coercive force that partly constitutes the international political order. One way or another, all wars are about power, and therefore all wars inevitably factor in the superpower. Declaring isolationism will never protect the US from being attacked.

Obama has already demonstrated that imprudently promising an end to American war. In truth, the call to war for any country is often driven more by events outside that country’s borders, and the intentions of a single leader can rarely stand in the way of the inevitable – remember, George Bush Jr came to power expecting to be a peacetime President. Paul’s rhetoric is hopeful, but it is based on a fantasy that can never be realised unilaterally. Were Ron Paul ever to find himself in the unlikely position of holding office, his principles would not survive first contact with the enemy.