When thinking about strategy involving an opponent that shares your assumptions, Chess seems like a good planning analogy. Aim to win. Deliver stunning strikes. Capture pieces. Play again.

Maybe Americans also need to start thinking in terms of the game Go, wherein you win by accumulating safe spaces (eyes) within a perimeter. This strategy seems to be a good way to think about the counterinsurgency program in Iraq, for example. Check wikipedia to see an overview of Go rules.

Europe, the US, and other free countries allow eyes of ideology/territory to develop within them. Saudi Arabia and Islamic countries do not. ‘Movement of populations’ (Greece-Turkey, Cyprus, perhaps Lebanon soon, see Tony Badran) is one way to enclose safe space, at the risk of a closed society.

I have always wondered why the US doesn’t invest massively in South and Central America in the same way that Saudi Arabia invests massively in Islamic countries. South America chould be a safe area for the US, but not in a sense of an old manifest destiny. Paraguay reveres U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes for his support regarding the War of the Triple Alliance, and that didn’t cost the President very much. At least someone remembers him.

Spain and Germany, which used to seem quite different politically and culturally, are increasingly similar (except that Spain has the better soccer side this time around). So too, The US and Latin American could be seen to be increasingly similar, at least when the alternative is the capturing of strategic geographical and ideological area by Islamic players.

In general, any friends of the Lady of Guadalupe are friends of mine. Those t-shirts incline me favorably to increased, legal Hispanic immigration.