Another way might be to make friends, to be seen as a benefactor of the poor, oppressed, those without much in the material sense. One could work cooperatively, creating an atmosphere where most of the folks on earth would regard it as not in their best interests for the US to be attacked. An atmosphere where people would work with the US to neutralize threats to either the US or themselves.

That's not as ego gratifying as the "bring 'em on" mentality, but certainly would have to be more effective as demonstrated by the experiments with invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Those have been counterproductive, at best, expensive in terms of life, limb and treasure and producing results which are the opposite of the stated aims.

Just some of the holes in this quaint theory:

--Most of the foks on Earth aren't attacking the U.S.

--People are working with the U.S. to stop terrorists

--States with absolutely no foreign involvement are still targets.

--No nation on Earth has aided the poor, disaster-stricken, and oppressed more than the United States has. In 2005, the U.S. sent almost $275 million in aid to the Palestinians alone.

--9/11 occurred before there were troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the year 2000, there were six times as many U.S. military personnel in Camp Pendleton than there were in the entire Middle East.

Maybe you could just go with Occam's Razor, and just take the thousands of pages of writing and hundreds of hours of speeches from radical Islamists at face value, when they declare they cannot share a planet with anyone who does not believe exactly as they do, and that the alternatives are conversion or death.