When George Washington left office, he advised the young country to do two things: avoid entangling alliances and political parties. It was already too late for political parties, but the government did manage to keep itself out of foreign affairs until World War I, and even then we entered the war reluctantly.

However, Washington was also a proponent of a strong centralized national government, which really only matured after the trust-busting progressives had taken office, Wilson mobilized a country for war, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt got to help out the common man with his New Deal. As it turned out, our powerful government just loved to start making friends left and right.

For example, with the Marshall Plan after World War II we not only made helped out our allies, we made good friends with our enemies. Now all these alliances have gotten us into trouble, because we have friends on both sides of what looks to be the escalation of a war in the Middle East. If we support Israel militarily, we end up losing our Islamic friends.

If we don't support Israel, we risk distancing ourselves from our Western friends. Our tactics of making friends with everyone has backfired so that our government is a position where it will have to forsake some of its friends in order to keep others. I don't support the nation going back to a policy of isolation, but I hope that our government will have the wisdom to reduce it's list of friends so that it will have the ability to help our true friends in need.