I do understand our traditional foreign policy. I just don't believe it's been relevant since around 1917. Certainly not since 1941.
There is absolutely nothing in the traditional Washington/Jefferson foreign policy which would have interfered in the slightest with out responding to the Japanese attack on December 6, 1941; nor to Germany's Declaration of War on December 8, 1941.
The issue here is our present folly in Washington (the city), where we are actually helping our enemy to recruit by over-dramatising his capability, and unnecesarily insulting those from whom he seeks to recruit in the future, by idiotic plots to change other people's culture. That is moronic. You need look no further than the Brits 400 year experiment in Ireland, to recognize how counter-productive it is.
Let me urge consideration for the juxtaposition of Washington's wisdom with Bush's 2nd Inaugural Address--the little debate we staged in early 2005, for all who are interested in weighing the conflicting appoaches: George Washington Debates George W. Bush.
Washington's approach was for the ages. The Neocon policy is simply a rehash of the madness followed by the leftist Democratic foreign policy of Dean Rusk (1961-1969), which led to terrible massacres in Ruanda and Nigeria, and a decline in Western influence in much of Africa.
William Flax