Reply To: Which past president would you want now?

One should note that American isolationism was based on the fact that America’s military wasn’t even able to defend the country (we only defeated the British since we had help from several other countries, and especially France). We several years after Washington the US launched what amounted to a “special forces” raid we largely used locally recruited mercenaries and it was so amazing we still sing about to this day (in the Marine hymn, the “Shores of Tripoli”). Like most of the founding fathers, while being very pragmatic he was also quite self-righteous and if he ever imagined the USA has a major power he would have expected us to be interventionist good guys saving the world.