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I'm an isolationist. I believe in a strong military, with the caveat that it should be used to protect and defend the US and to prevent horrors such as what happened to the Yazidis and other minorities that would better be served by a Kurdish nation and a strong Syria.

When the mapmakers redrew the Mideast map after WW1, they created Saudi Arabia and didn't give the Kurds a nation. The Balfour decision in 1917 was an English diplomat saying Israel should have a nation in the Mideast. All that pretty much mucked up the Mideast. It was supposed to be a solution to end all wars, instead it demonstrated that WWI never should've happened.

The Yazidis and others were doing fine until we and our allies opted for regime change initiatives, which destabilized nations and removed the heavy hands that kept the maniacs in check. Which nations benefit? Not us.

Yes, that is the corollary to reducing radically the global footprint of the United States. To do so would mean some rather unpleasant events would take place in a number of countries. To embrace a continental-nationalist foreign and defense policy would also require the United states to be will to act with real ruthless dispatch against any international actor that is a real threat to the nation or who perpetrates any attack on the US. Such a policy would also require a really powerful US military establishment that would be configured to stand guard over the US sphere. Admiral Mahan posited before 1914 that this was North America, the Caribbean and Central America and South America to a line from the mouth of the Amazon straight across to the Pacific. In the pacific the line stretches from the tip of the Seward Peninsula of Alaska south to the Hawaiian Islands and then south to the junction with the South America boundary. He also included Guam and the Philippines as US possessions but not vital to the US. I would include Guam and the North Marianas and a several hundred mile circle around them and Midway and Wake Islands and Johnston Island a thousand miles south of Hawaii. A US heavily armed with its military focuses on being professional military people, not managers, or the Salvation Army with guns or ‘nation builders’ behind the hedge of two wide oceans and, something Admiral Mahan did not figure into, the absolute strongest power in the exo-atmosphere and Outer Space is a not unappealing thought. It will never come to this as there are too many interests tied into our current globalist system. Too bad, in my opinion. The USA should not be the world's peace keeper. The turmoil and uproar in much of the world is of the ‘woes of less happy and lesser lands’, not ours.