<Does that mean that every nation the US doesn't like will be attacked if they don't get nukes, and are home free if they do? Or any nation. At will.

No. Only nations run by psychotic monsters who are likely to use nukes unprovoked, or provoked by things only seen by their ravaged brains. And even then, it's a difficult decision.

Some people have wondered about how history would have turned out if we had flattened Stalin's Soviet Union before they got nukes. My own reading of this is that there is no easy answer to that question. Some people have wondered how things would have turned out if we had flattened Hitler the minute he moved into the Rhineland. No easy answers there, either.

And is the only question today concerning military action whether or not there is direct danger to America? Paleoconservatives and purist libertarians would keep us inside our own borders, and avoid any overseas entanglements. Our Founding Fathers would have probably have agreed, but the Atlantic and Pacific were one hell of a lot wider back then.

Many of our overseas entanglements during the Cold War were justified, correctly or not, by the need to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union, a system demonstrably hostile to human freedom. But that isn't a workable scenario today. So why did we go into Bosnia? We were not threatened. Can we justify attacking another nation simply for abuse of its own citizens? Again, no easy answers. A good case can be made that a nation that obliterates its own citizens will inevitably move outward to destroy others, if only to survive. Does the case hold up?

What if Hitler's Germany had not been expansionist? What if they had settled down within their own borders, and proceeded to systematically obliterate every last Jew in their nation? Would this have been worth attacking them? Why or why not?

Is there a working protocol for this? A "Bush Doctrine" or "Whoever Doctrine" that actually would work wherever applied? The hardliners from all perimeters of the political spectrum have their answers, but I don't think their answers will work. And I've got nothing much better. Anybody else?