America can’t afford to be isolationist. Outside trade is the basis for US prosperity, and what goes on in the rest of the world will affect the US and its people, and if certain countries aren’t held in check, they will threaten America fundamentally from a position of greater strength.
This is why America needs allies and to be involved in global politics. Ancient China fell behind because it pulled up the drawbridge and tried to ignore the rest of the world, thus ending up getting owned by Europeans in the 19th century...
[Is Isolationism on the Rise?]
I can’t tell from where I am, huddled in a fetal position in a cardboard box under the viaduct.
What is on the rise is non-interventionism. That is, we will trade with the world but no more providing our troops to die as world policeman. Defend American not the World.
One common mistake that people make, especially dumb-ass lefty hippies, is to confuse support of a nation or regime in a certain action with being “friends”. For example, ol’ Saddam was never a friend of the US. For most of the 1980s, he was fighting a war against Iran, which was an active enemy of the US, so we supported him, just like we supported the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. In both cases, those that we supported eventually turned on us, but that was primarily because we were never friends; we just had a common enemy. Now, a case could be made that we have no business trying to engage in such international manipulations, but it is only the naive who think that these twists and turns of international partnerships are in anyway the result of personal feelings for anyone. It’s just business.