Anyone with enough temerity to suggest it mightn't be wise that America circuits the globe with roving security patrols - warships, aircraft, armor, infantry - and jams its thumb in every other country's sovereignty pie is reflexively stamped with the tag "isolationist", conjuring up a long ago of tubby, cracker-barrel squires in straw boaters giggling at them funny "Major Hoople" comics, listening to Father Coughlin on radio and turning up their noses at a world awash in oceanic gore borne of clashing dogma and militant plunder.

If we don't sally forth in search of foreign dragons to destroy, to install democracy on every jerkwater, goat-herd outback, we're "latter-day Lindbergh's". (The aviation pioneer, the first to cross the Atlantic non-stop in a cockpit, was an advocate of staying out of the European debacle that became World War II. Strangely, almost 65 years after that catastrophic clash of civilizations, his brief is still in contention.)

That "we are the world" motif doesn't extend only to strategic matters, but to those economic, as well; if we are to bring our planet up to speed politically, we must also do so commercially. As we're tirelessly reminded: When goods no longer cross borders, armies do.

Read more »