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Your definition of isolationism makes no sense. The alliances that France had with the UK and Russia at the start of WWI served France's own interests, for example, yet France wouldn't be painted as isolationist. Countries make alliances that serve their own interest - how often do you see countries making alliances for net loss?

And despite you quoting several people including terms like "forbearing at all times, and in every way ... intervention and interference", I have already furnished you with more than a few examples of the US actively intervening and interfering. The US not only meddled a heap in the Americas, but also outside it's own area (like the Philippines and Japan, already mentioned). Neither does 'non-intervention' square with things like backing Cuba in a war of independence against Spain. That's the living, breathing definition of 'intervention'.

You seem to be missing my point that the US was politically isolationist with respect to Europe, but it wasn't isolationist outside of Europe.

> Afghanistan was for our own interests; we were attacked by a group sheltered by their government. Iraq was not. Syria is not. Balkans in the 1990s was not.

This is all total propaganda. Iraq was 100% in the US's interests (or perhaps better put, the incumbent government's interests), and the US fabricated a casus belli to invade, against the wishes of its allies, and with no quality intelligence. Syria is a leftover from the Iraq debacle; the US would lose considerable international reputation if it just shrugged and walked away from the consequences of the clusterfuck it caused in Iraq. There was no alliance requiring that the US invade unilaterally in the case of Iraq, and the consequences of that populist action are now tearing Europe apart. There is more to national interests than conquering territory and acts of military revenge.

If the US got itself involved in conflicts that weren't in its interests, then it'd be much more involved in sub-Saharan Africa. Or filling eastern Ukraine with gung-ho marines and reverting the annexation of Crimea. I don't expect any nation to act against its interests, but if people are going to persist with the myth that the US really is the 'world cop', then it's a corrupt cop who looks the other way when there's no kickback coming its way.



We'll just have to agree to disagree.




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