And, you know -- let's compare! America, 1950-onwards. The world's Keystone Kop vs. Europe fucking subjugating the known world, 1500-1950.
We've stuck our nose in lots of places, but all of them are colonial fallout zones. Korea is communist paranoia, but it even has roots in European shenanigans in China and the Japanese aping the European model (and feeling compelled to compete). Vietnam is a French colonial fuckup on a level that blows the mind. Even our dealings in the Mideast are tripping over loose ends left by colonialism.
Most of this world has been brutally abandoned without support. The colonial powers let these colonies off without any sort of support and, in the case of most powers, infrastructure. For nearly 500 years they raped the entire planet and created a vast underclass ruled by a minority super-class and, when it got too expensive, they pulled out overnight and left everyone to fend for themselves. The whole face of Africa, the Mideast, large swaths of South America, and much of Asia is because the Europeans stuck much much more than their noses into things and then abandoned it all with a shrug and a tut-tut, isn't that a shame.
Then here comes young, misguided, child-like America. A superpower only by virtue of the fact that it's the last man standing after a cataclysmic global war. What does a child do if it's handed the reins of the world? With that sort of good-natured hubris, it tries to make things right... Whatever "right" is. Everybody should be like America, right? Because we're free and rich and happy... And why aren't they? We were burned by our early colonial efforts, so we know colonies are wrong. Despite appearances otherwise, we have no stomach for serious military commitment. War for us is, through those child-like eyes, more of a game. We get scared when the real face is shown to us (though, typically, we're too deep in the game to extract ourselves properly when we do lose heart).
With the world basically shattered, we were allowed to indulge all of our childlike whims. The world is still shattered from the World War era. Europe has just this decade started to properly emerge from the ashes. We had 50 years to indulge every fantasy and so, now, we're run by a weird ultra-capitalist corporate oligarchy. That's the direction we've been going in since the 1880's, but it's always been checked by our own limitations. Our insular, individualistic, carefree attitude. Our second banana status to the rest of the world. Wilson failed at Versailles because we were a joke. The adult world saw us as the child we were. But when all those adults died on the sacrificial altar of fascism... Well, there was no one left to criticize us. No one else to slow us down.
