John Kelsey wrote:
No policy toward anyone isn't possible once there's any kind of contact. There are terrorists who'd want to do nasty things to us for simply allowing global trade, or for allowing trade with repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, or for selling weapons to countries with bad human rights records. Osama Bin Laden might not hate us, but *someone* would.Baloney. The terrorists have made it pretty clear what their gripe with the U.S. Government is, and it has nothing to do with trade, the American lifestyle, or the elusive freedoms that Americans supposedly enjoy. It has everything to do with US troops stationed in nearly every country in the world (specifically, Saudi Arabia), meddling in Middle Eastern conflicts (the never-ending Israeli-Arab feud), and the steady stream of Arab corpses that Clinton and the Bushes have produced over the last ten years or so (thousands of Afghani civilians killed by US bombs in the last year or so; the bombing of Iraq that has stretch uninterrupted from the beginning of the Persian Gulf War to the present day).
Neutrality and noninterventionism work spectacularly well as a foreign policy. Just take a look at Switzerland: seven centuries of peace and freedom, with the exception of a few years
during the Napoleanic era, and never a problem with terrorists.
Even if we were just an economic giant with little foreign policy, we'd still have an impact by which countries we chose to trade withHow about "Friendship and free trade with all, entangling alliances with none," to quote Thomas Jefferson? A trade policy that doesn't choose favorites avoids any problem of others wishing to influence U.S. trade policy.
