>>I call category 2 and 3 traitors or uniformed. #1 has a point but impractical as interwoven as we have made our economies and natural resource requirements. It would take years of planning to "withdraw" from the world. A good start would be to bring home all troops in Europe, today and take everything that is not bolted down that belongs to us.
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>Uniformed? Do you mean uninformed?
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>Why traitors? I'd say you belong to category 2. An external or internal locus of control (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control) is merely an attribute. It doesn't make the person a traitor. A traitor is someone who betrays, simple as that.
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>I don't mind seeing all US troops leaving Europe. Do you really think that we still need them here? Well, perhaps that's the case, but I'm not aware of the reasons. It may well be an artefact from history that needs to be addressed. It can save your country a lot of money.
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>Take everything that is not bolted down that belongs to us. Do you refer here to those troops in Europe? Or to everything in the world that's owned by the US or US companies? In the latter case the reply is that the debt of the US and its companies to the rest of the world is enormous. You are all totally unable to pay that debt back if it was collected this year. If it was not for the dollar, your country would've been bankrupt long ago. As a matter of fact, I think that would've been a better scenario. The US would not have let it happen and instructed their citizens to consume not more than what was earned.

The U.S. has been very generous and helpful throughout the recent history, especially when it comes to Europe. Think first world war, second world war, Marshall aid, rebuilding of Japan and Germany, etc. etc. Not so in Central and Latin America, though. Think Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, etc. etc. So, I don't think at least the Europeans really have much reason to complain when it comes to that. In my experience, having been born and raised in Europe, it is somehow fashionable or "intellectually cool" to criticize the U.S. over there. And the reverse is often true on this side of the Pond.

But to me at least it is also silly how there remains this "we will go to play in our own sandbox" attitude in the U.S., which totally disregards the fact that we live in a very tightly networked and interdependent world. A lot of U.S. companies absolutely depend on European sales (and vice versa), and if U.S. would pull everything out of everywhere in the world it would likely destroy the U.S. economy along with all other economies in the world. And the same would probably happen if EU would pull out of all other sandboxes except its own.
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