I meant political isolationism in the sense minimum contact with non-allied nations(ex Israel and S.Korea) no military intervention in non-allied nations(no more somlalia and so forth) Trade would continue but thats private buisness so it's the goverments problem so if I want to buy stuff from Hong Kong I still can I just can't open diplomatic discussions with them.

On your outsourcing comments blick we need to reduce those nations doing our work for us we should give American work and American jobs to Americans

Complete isolation would fail, obviously, because outside trade is needed for a country to thrive. However, I do believe the US should take it's foot out of the door of international conflict and let people settle their differences without American troops getting involved. Korea, Vietnam, and the two Gulf Wars should have never happened. We just got screwed over in the long run. Communism fell apart due to its own internal conflicts, not the feeble efforts of the West to "contain" it. And I won't even bother getting into why this "war" on terrorism is sheer idiocy.

I suppose what I long for is a time much like it was before the first and second world wars, when the US didn't have a massive standing army, and we didn't care who was taking over Europe, or what African warlord was killing thousands of people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It doesn't concern us, so why should we waste American money and American lives to stick our collective nose in business that's not ours?

This is a rather impractical proposal. Like it or not, the US is firmly enmeshed with the rest of the world. We outsource to India and China and a whole host of other nations. A good deal of our work gets done in India these days. We import and export goods, and we have an appetite for oil, which is largely obtained from the middle east and Africa. As long as we desire these things, there is no way that we are going to pull out. What would the oil companies and the Saudis do in the middle east if the US just picked up and left? What would happen in Afghanistan? In Iraq? What would happen if we just stopped dealing with China?

Sure, you say that this would not exclude trade relations, but realistically, how are you going to continue to trade with a nation and not deal with them in any other way?

And yes, SOME of the rest of the world has problems with us, but it is usually only because we have walked all over them at one time or another. Case in point: Iraq. Way back when we were fighting the evil Soviet empire, we supported Saddam because he was aligned against the Soviets as well. Never mind that he was a despot; he was OUR despot, and that made all the difference in the world, at least as far as we were concerned at the time. Of course once the Soviets were history, we didnt really need him any more, but we had certainly armed him well, and it would be a bit awkward to deal with him. It escapes me why we didnt take him out of power back in the early 90's, but the bottom line is we left him in. Cut to the new millenium. We invade Iraq, charging that Saddam possesses WMD's (which are never found), invade, kill numbers of people and bring about chaos. And we wonder why they have problems with us...

My point in bringing this up is not to start a debate about Iraq, but to illustrate my point that a lot of the image problem that America has is, to a certain degree, self inflicted. Yes, we do a lot of good things as well, but it seems that people have a longer memory for wrongs than rights done to them, and we have done our share of wrongs in the world.

I think that it is almost (if not totally) impossible for us to go into a state of isolationism, or at least impossible for us to do that while maintaining the lifestyle and standard of living that we are accustomed to. The best thing for us to do if we are concerned with the opinion of the rest of the world is probably to stop provoking them so much...

To expand on this some more this would not mean the exclusion of use from things like trade or Satellite usage so the world can still get their TV, GPS and Sat Phones they just have to pay as usual.
the ISS would still be cool and just about the only non-allied forgien contact the US would have (though most ISS folks are Allies so there you go)

Okay fine we can still send some money to the starving kids but the aid to say egypt? with that money we can build two AEGIS cruisers that in two minutes can loose more military power than man has used from the first thrown rock to Hiroshima and what does egypt do for us? nothing well they attack Israel once in a while but I think they've learned their lesson about doing that

As Bon Jovi says "when the workd gets in my face, I say have a nice day"

I almost agree with you completely. Except about aiding Africa. It's about time someone said this.

I consider myself to be a very liberal person, but I think that the United States is a great country and am sick of the rest of the world's view of this country and Americans in general. Everyone has the right to disagree with the US, but the generalization has got to stop. It's just pathetic and petty.