From an ideal perspective, eh? Well, okay, but you asked for it…

From an ideal perspective, the best solution to ensuring the security of any nation is a radical commitment to peace, truth, and kindness. (yeah yeah, stop laughing already, it’s true)

This means building relationships—not just between politicians—but between entire cultures, so that there is listening and understanding. In other words, asking everybody in the nation to learn everything they can about other peoples and nations, and asking them to think instead of surrendering to fear.

A commitment to peace of course means standing up for yourself (you don’t just roll over), but it also means setting limits for yourself in how you respond to threats. It means going to enormous lengths to understand why anyone would want to do you harm in the first place, and listening to their criticisms—even if they have already attacked you. That listening might even mean adjusting your own way of life, or at least making very sure that your way of life isn’t impacting theirs. And it means accepting different cultures—regardless of the injustices we see in them (i.e. helping them change by pursuasion, not by force or manipulation).

And that means fostering a culture of listening at home and abroad—but especially at home—going all out to heal internal divisons, abandon adversarial politics and worldviews, to erase economic and social inequalities—no matter how justified they might seem to be. It means checking your ego. In short, it means a hell of a long road, but it also means that when you’ve been on it for a while, nobody will want to attack you, and even if they do, the nation does not react out of fear, but has the courage and presence of mind to say: alright, you hurt us, now what seems to be the problem?—instead of bombing the crap out of them, which only perpetuates the "might is right" mentality. Only when peace is more important than our lives and ambitions will we ever truly attain it.

By the time something like a 9/11 happens, the nation has already failed countless times to understand the person who has become the enemy.

Well, that’s what would work from an ideal perspective. Unfortunately it seems like fear/hate, ignorance, and greed (on various sides) usually stand in the way of ideal solutions.