The United States should adopt a stricter isolationist stance

Well let's clear up Israel first off. That land has been Israels forever. There has always been a population of Jews living there. The jews themselves were displaced and that is when you start to see a strong arab prescence. Also to be quite frank with you, God gave that land to the Jews. It even says that in the Koran. Israel is just doing exactly what we do and that is defend itself. There are so many different conflicts and situations where you COULD say that America is borderline terroristic and invasive of other countries. To say that the land was stolen is ridiculous. Our relations are hurt with other middle eastern countries because we don't live under a 13th century society the degrades women and allows for no freedoms. Recall the recent news of the British school teacher who held a democratic type vote to decide a name of a teddy bear and when the name Muhammed was chosen, see was jailed and the public wanted her execution. Think of the filmmaker from the Netherlands who made a 5 min or 10 min short film about the ill effects of Islam in his country. Local muslims beheaded him. They are not our natural allies and they stand against everything we value. Granted there might be some more progressive muslim and middle eastern communities but they are few and far between. Free Trade is good in theory, but again we should begin to rely on our own ingenuity. The current energy crisis makes us so dependent on the rest of the world that all they would have to do to bring us to our knees is halt the supply of oil. I hope that when you refer to free trade you are not referring to NAFTA, because that smacks of less sovereignty. There are nessecities that we would required to import, and there are things that we have that we could defiantely makes some arrangements to export to other countries. There is not much though that we couldn't provide for ourselves. We need to bring those large corporations back and reach a mutual agreement with them so that both the government and the company can be happy. I don't know about where you are but I live in kentucky and we had several factories go overseas and there are still people without jobs. While yes this is kind of dealing with the economy, if we brought our jobs home or created new jobs to begin manufacturing products that Americans need on American soil the need for extensive trade would be minimal. With going to save our citizens it's not a matter of oh you are over there now and you belong to them, but a matter of our duty to the citizens who make up our country. To not go when they are threatened says to our citizens, most whom would support a rescue that the government doesn't care about them, and then to the country responsible that we are weak and they can push us around. That's the stance Jimmy Carter took. He would wag his finger and call the party responsible bad men and always stay on the defensive. No I am afraid that strong militaristic aggressiveness is what this country needs. It shows that we mean business, that we won't wait for something bad to happen first (like Israel might I remind you), and most importantly it shows that our citizens safety is first and foremost over things like money and trade agreements. Do you know that if any of the presidents preceding Reagan going back to the start of the Cold War had dropped the whole Policy of Containment and began a massive military build up like Reagan did the cold war might have ended sooner? Similarly if Reagan had continued the same dead end policy and stayed on the defensive we very well could still be in the Cold War today. In closing I would like to say that you have made some excellent points and feel free to invite me to debate at any time. Thank you for your time and courtesy.