Personally, I think we are pretty respectful of most other countries - excluding, for good reason, the ones who already hate us because we’re rich|non-muslim|not-them|some-other-ideology-at-play. Before the rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism, there were certainly others at play on the world stage: religious, political, ethnic, and otherwise.

I think the only way to be not a ‘useful’ target to any organization (terror or governmental) is to be a small enough player that what you have nobody else cares about. For that to happen to the US, our economy would have to freed from such deep ties to others around the world, we’d need to have fewer natural resources, a smaller population, no reason for folks to want to immigrate here, and be otherwise worse-off than those places that currently hate us.

But that being said, they still have dozens of proven, popular models they could very easily import.

I think we should let them fail, and we probably should have let the banks fail too and deflate the horrible amounts of leverage this country thinks is normal. All we’re doing is putting off another inevitable boom/bust if we can’t change our culture of thinking large amounts of leverage is OK.