WWII alone makes it hard to argue that U.S. foreign policy has been on balance destructive... ********************
Future historians, if any, will review the history of the United States, and conclude that its foreign policy was, mostly, no different in character from that of Imperial Rome, Imperial Britain, the USSR and other faded 'great powers'.
It's cultural tendencies, domestically, for relative freedom of movement and information and the fact that millions of its citizens enjoyed, for a time, material prosperity will be considered noteworthy and probably admirable.
But its style of engagement with the world outside of itself – from the young nation's war against North American aborigines, to the importation of slave labor on a massive scale, through the violent meddling in the affairs of its neighbors in the Americas and its imperial assaults upon the Phillipines, Hawaii and other locales distant from its shores – will seem no more noble than Rome's war against Gaul or Britain's colonization of India.
World War Two, while a significant event – although, by the standards of generations yet to come who may witness terrors only novelists can imagine, it may seem less pivotal than it does now – was not entered into after a national discussion of the threat to democracy and a decision to go to war to defend it.
A military base in the Hawaiian colony was attacked by the Japanese, a people considered racially inferior. All that followed – including the liberation of Nazi death camps – was the happy, and unplanned, result of what was essentially (geopolitical machinations of the elite notwithstanding) a war for bloody revenge.
Will these historians, reviewing the entire record, look at the global war years of the mid twentieth century, and say, 'well, on balance, this war against fascism proves that the US's foreign policy was beneficial for a troubled world.'
Free of our emotional attachments, and perhaps, a bit wiser (one can hope) I do not believe that they will.
........
The bored 14 year old in Beijing, looking at the screen of his hand-held education/entertainment assistant, will half listen as his teacher reads off the names of faded empires: Rome, Britain, Soviet, American.
They will all seem essentially the same.
DRM
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