Obviously thoughtful. You recommend a foreign policy with many more similarities to what I recommended than differences.

Picking just one of your recommendations that maybe justifies more thought, it might be "...at this time in America's history and economic state - needs to be exceptionally protectionist and not willing to subsidize the world at domestic expense."

I sure agree that we shouldn't be subsidizing the world at domestic expense. But the is a real danger in assuming a posture of economic protectionism. Our economy depends on the rest of the world to either supply us with materials, buy the products we produce, or--not an insignificant issue--buy our debt which we use to finance our government. Strict protectionism by the U.S. would certainly result in a corresponding response by our trading partners and buyers of our debt, which would be very much to our detriment.

A very simplistic example would be if the U.S. were to cancel our participation in the NAFTA agreement because of its effect on American jobs. Obviously, Canada and Mexico would be very upset at the deleterious effect on their economies. In that Canada is our largest supplier of oil and Mexico third (Saudi Arabia is second), it wouldn't take a huge leap to expect that Canada and Mexico might use our dependence on their oil to craft a response to our action that we might not like. China will buy all the oil that Canada and Mexico will send them. That would materially increase our reliance on getting more oil from the Middle East or from Hugo Chavez' Venezuela, our fourth largest supplier, as well as Nigeria and Angola (fifth and sixth largest suppliers), neither of which have particularly stable governments.

Other than me not embracing economic protectionisn, you and I agree on a lot more things regarding foreign policy than we disagree on. Further, I don't disagree that certain countries are "on the rise" and would have no compunction to take advantage of our vulnerability...and we are currently very vulnerable with weakened miltary capability, an economy on life support, and a fragile and unproven new political administration. It's pretty clear that countries like China, India and Russia are taking advantage of our situation with every opportunity.

The new administration will have to think through how a revamped foreign policy can best serve the U.S. very quickly. And the administration will have to exhibit a steely resolve to ignore the narrow interests who disagree with modified policies. While the Chinese seem to be greeting our greater commitment to diplomacy with them quite enthusiastically, U.S. human rights activists are enraged that Secretary of State Clinton announced that "human rights issues are not on the table". She went on to say that we know we will not reach agreement on those issues, so we want to expand our discussions to issues where the two countries can reach mutually positive agreements. As I suggested in my original post, what's best for the U.S. and our citizens on a broad front should be most important in crafting our foreign policy.