America has been seen as the world’s supreme supperpower since the second World War and what this entails is being able to control militarily, politically, and economically. This has become an American value, to control everything. Robert L. Khols describes this in his paper, “The Values Americans Live By.” I believe that this is truly part of current American culture. Being in control of everything can be both a good and a bad thing. At times one single power being able to to control everything can help cause events to happen more smoothly, but at other times the lack of input from other sources just messes everything up.(Khols, 2)

Americans feel as though they need to be number one this can be in their general lives or in the lives of others. They need to try to solve the world’s problems I’m going to stop marking grammar and punctuation errors here because there are too many.

Another major way we hurt other countries and ourselves is to get involved in a civil conflict and allow the people of that country become dependent on our aid. This makes it extremely hard to exit that country even once the conflict is settled because of remaining instability of economy, government and military making it difficult to decide when things are stable enough to leave. This happened and is happening in Iraq when the US went in after 9/11 we took over militarily to be able to rid the country of the terrorists who were there. The US began to build the Iraqi military back up so that it could fend for its self, but as we see today even with the aid of the US their military remains much too small and under trained and continues to be reliant on the US to provide military support to keep their borders safe. The the US also intervened in the government of Iraq in an attempt to set up a democratic government. They wanted to allow the people of the country to hold open elections and to vote much like the US. We provided backing for a leader and then others were put on the ballot who were either terrorists or associated with terrorist organizations, and the candidate backed by the US lost because of the threats of the other candidates. Now both the government and military are very week and cannot support themselves when we pull out our troops and aid to their country.

As a 17 year old citizen of the United State of America, almost part of the voting body, would ask our government to take into consideration the facts that I have laid out in this paper. Perhaps we can look to find a new base of values for running our government. I believe our government needs to more carefully consider the consequences before we decide to become involved in the conflicts and issues in other countries. I would suggest that we stop aiding other countries by giving them money when our own country is already so far in debt that we cannot at this point in our spending pull out of it. However, since we are already involved in Iraq I do not believe we should pull out all of our military and financial support too quickly because we could very possibly hurt both countries in doing this by allowing the terrorist to regain control. From this point forward we should make sure that we do not enter into a war without using the just war theory, which our government is trying to throw out, because although it is based on Bible principles it offers a great way to understand whether or not to send troops into another country. Next we need to focus on bringing jobs and money back to our country and maybe focus our control on what is going on here to better our country so we do not look like hypocrites in the worlds eyes.

Thank you for listening to my humble opinions and taking into consideration that this country is too focused on controlling the rest of the world. I would be honored if you would allow these thoughts to make you think for a moment about our country and even possibly work to make changes. Of course you do not have to listen to me and you could say I am only a child with no experience in politics but I respect the fact that you cared enough to read all the way to the end. Thank you!

Respectfully Submitted,

Nicholas