I very much agree with the conclusion of Thanassis Cambanis’s “Stop trying to fix everything’’ (Ideas, Feb. 18), that the United States and the world would be better off if our country had a much more restrained approach to foreign policy. We should not try to “fix’’ everything, especially since everything we try to fix gets much worse.

Cambanis talks about our “strain of internationalist idealism,’’ and I think a lot of Americans do buy into that way of thinking. But I’m quite sure that our leaders know that they are not engaging in all this military activity out of altruism. Our government wants to control the world and its resources, and it thinks up high-minded justifications to tell us. This or that leader is always “killing his own people,’’ threatening us with weapons of mass destruction, or somehow misbehaving. Never mind that more people, by orders of magnitude, are usually killed in our supposed fixes than were killed by the leader our government wants to unseat, or that our country is the one with more weapons of mass destruction than any other country in the world.

Susan McLucas

Somerville