Nicholas Goldberg: Can the US strike a balance between isolationism and policing the world?

Americans are tired of war.

We just got out of a 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan with little to show for it except the Taliban reinstated, burqa sales up and the country plunged into turmoil. Before that, the seven-year-long war in Iraq didn't make Americans safer, nor did it make that country a thriving democracy or uncover weapons of mass destruction.

Trillions of dollars later and thousands of lives gone, many Americans — on both the left and right — are feeling skeptical about foreign entanglements and urging a retreat from the global