In the early 1800s the Barbary States kidnapped and ransomed American sailors. Some Americans advised appeasement, but Mr. Jefferson declined to be intimidated. He raised up a navy to subdue the pirates and ensure the Atlantic was safe for American seafaring.

Mr. Rhamey implicitly believes that the advent of aeronautics, atomic weaponry, civil aviation, economic specialization, global trade, and the internet should have no effect on our foreign policy. He explicitly believes the United States’ present status a superpower nonetheless obliges it to conduct diplomacy as if it were a feeble collection of restless states in constant danger of invasion and conquest. This, as should be obvious, is derangement.

In the age we inhabit, that of global epidemics, interdependent economies, non-state actors lusting after mighty weapons, and a burgeoning world culture, non-interventionism as practiced by the United States would be disastrous. The survival of millions depends on the United States’ promotion of globalization.

The survival of many more depends on American power. It was the American military that kept Soviet tanks out of London, Paris, and Rome during the Cold War. It is the same interventionist spirit that protects Seoul and Tokyo from North Korean bombardment, Taipei from Communist Chinese invasion, and is trying — and succeeding, it is very worth adding — to protect Baghdad from destruction by gangsters and jihadists.

Some people, including, by his own admission, Mr. Rhamey, are xenophobic enough to believe the aforementioned commitments unworthy of the United States’ time and money. Although I and many others see a moral imperative in, say, shielding South Korea from the Stalinist slave state to its north or preventing Iran from annexing half of Iraq, one would have to be exceedingly myopic and provincial not to see American security implicated in these conflicts. Yet a proponent of non-interventionism wouldn’t see a threat worth addressing unless it came crashing into a skyscraper in the form of hijacked aircraft.

It is irksome and risible when non-interventionists call themselves prudent as they demand a hermetic, shriveled foreign policy and an end to alliances. It is deplorable and hysterical when they counsel Americans to preen our democracy as starving millions beg for succor and besieged dissidents take stock of their comrades. For this, Mr. Rhamey and those of like mind bear deep, deep shame.