Once upon a time, I thought that the US might have been better off if we had stayed under British rule instead of having a revolution. My thoughts were driven by some of our naive foreign policy concepts. After considering the thoughts in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, I decided that better foreign policy was not enough to justify my ideas. After all, has there ever been a revolution run by men who were well off under the existing regime, and with a lot to lose if they failed?

My thoughts on dumb US foreign policy are best illustrated by the following.

I have read that Churchill & Montgomery consistently complained (in private correspondence, not public comments) that the Americans did not know that having a common enemy did not make you a friend. This was said in reference to our attitude toward Russia during WWII. The British certainly had a better attitude about Russia than the Americans, and probably knew that Russia would be a big problem after the war. Our leaders seemed to have no clue until it was too late, and we had given away too much.

I have often thought about Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam. Three communist countries. Now communism is a threat to the American way of life, and perhaps should be fought tooth and nail. By the way, I do believe that communism is a terrible system in both principle and in practice. What I am driving at is the following.

Considering the three countries, there were eight possibilities for going to war: Fight none, fight all, fight one out of the three, fight two out of three. Now, it would seem that the country 90 miles off our shores is the most likely threat. Furthermore, Cuba was obviously the easiest of the three to conquer.

It seems to me that an argument could have been made for fighting all three: "Damn, fight any communist country which looks beatable." It seems that an argument could have been made for fighting none: "Hell, it isn't worth having Americans die to stop communism outside of the good old USA — Let's just deport the domestic ba***ds." If not choosing all or none, it would seem that going after only Cuba makes sense. Now what we did do was fight half way around the world against two countries close to China & Russia, while ignoring the little guy 90 miles away. We faced terrible logistics, potential for a disastrous world war if Russia and/or China decided to really get involved, and two fairly formidable opponents. Meanwhile, Cuba would have been a piece of cake.

Perhaps we Americans might have done better if we had hired English (or other foreign) experts to run our foreign policy.

On Israeli foreign policy: I recently saw a cute T-shirt. It showed an American Indian crying with a map of Israel in the background. The Indian was saying: "Ask me about trading land for peace."