Prior to the 2016 presidential election, the Justice asked the president of Brandeis Democrats, Jacob Edelman ’18, and the president of Brandeis Conservatives, Mark Gimelstein ’17, about several political issues. Their back-and-forth dialogue regarding national security is included below.

Mark Gimelstein: My general perspective on national security is that we should only be getting into conflicts in which our national security is under direct assault. … I also believe that a very important part of our national security should be upholding our allies, especially Israel. … We need to uphold our allies, we need to uphold their fight against terrorism and against aggression, because as NATO says, … “An attack against one is an attack against all.” …

Jacob Edelman: I don’t think that Mark and I take too dissimilar a view on this. I think that in order to best protect ourselves, we need to be good members of the international community. … We need to work as a country to shake off the rhetoric that Donald Trump has been spewing about how we’re going to abandon our defense pacts, and we need to let our team members on the international stage know that we will stand with them, just as they will stand with us. … We need to help people who are at-risk populations around the world. … That is how we create a safer country for ourselves and a safer world for our neighbors.

MG: I agree that Donald Trump is wrong about NATO and other pacts. I think that we should be upholding those pacts; those have worked for decades in helping preserve national security. … I think that we should be looking at what is best for our national defense. Are we threatened? If so, let’s attack and get out quickly and completely defeat the aggressor. If not, it’s not in our best interest to send our troops overseas. In response to you saying that we should be trying to help out at-risk populations, … listen, I want to live in a society without any war, total peace, but there’s always a cost to doing these kinds of things. … if we were to full-fledged intervene in the conflict [in Syria], we would just create more power vacuums. … So we have to be very prudent about where we pick our battles, and we have to be very, very tactful in understanding what’s at risk, and whether it benefits our security at the end of the day. …

JE: I think that Mark misinterpreted what I was saying about helping at-risk populations. I wasn’t speaking in terms of “liberating” populations through the use of weapons. I was talking about coming to humanitarian aid of people who are under the grip of brutal regimes, who are being held in cities under siege by fighting armies. … We’ve seen time and again that intervening on the other side of the world in conflicts that aren’t directly ours has not been a recipe for peace.

MG: So, if that’s the case, then I agree. … At the end of the day, we live in a very dangerous world, and we should be doing things and intervening in conflicts internationally only when we are threatened ourselves. …

JE: … To create a safer country for ourselves and a safer international community, the best thing that we can do is work to spread prosperity around the world, work to create a positive image of the United States and not solely an image of the country which is dropping a bomb on a town near you. …

—Mark Gimelstein’17 is a columnist for the Justice.