Military Actions
In George Washington's Farewell Address Washington states that we need to put good faith and justice towards all nations. To treat them equal to all the others, and not to get attached to one nation more than the other because when you favor the other nation more you will have a hard time making "friends" with that nations enemy. If you are neutral between both nations they know that if they both get involved in a war between each other that since your neutral you will not intervene as much as you would if you liked one nation over the other. Basically Washington says that we need to stay out of other nations wars if we weren't intentionally involved to begin with.
In the Wall Street Journal, the article about military action in Syria, Barrack Obama is jumping in and trying to stop the chemical weapon outrage by coming together with Iran. This is going to lead to another war, and we were never involved to begin with. The U.S. is a very powerful nation and we use that to try to get our way all the time. We go and get involved with all the other things that happen in the other nations trying to help everyone, but instead of helping we create a bigger problem. Since we are so powerful we try to get other nations to stop war by threatening them to start a war with them and basically wipe them off the map. Which makes them angry so they start a war with us and it turns out that we are blowing our power out of proportion and then we find ourselves struggling.
Washington states:
A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of...