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The post-WWII order was deliberately designed by clever American politicians who realised they could leverage the untouched industrial base and built-up military capability to become a world superpower, in an alliance with Western Europe. All of these policies were and are 100% America First, because the US has always been the primary benefactor of it all, but they've been marketed as some kind of benevolent altruistic goodwill-project that "leader of the free world" simply "has to do" because it's "the right thing".

Bullshit. It's naked greed all the way down. Exceptional? Exceptionally greedy more like it.






Greedy or not, somebody was going to become the dominant and even hegemonic world power after that colossal war and the nation state dynamics that followed it. Would you have preferred that it be something like the then still Stalinist USSR, or later perhaps the deeply authoritarian (and under Mao batshit crazy on its internal policies) China?

Given the inevitable rise of at least one dominant power, I prefer that it was the United States with its generally benevolent democratic traditions to model off of (even if it itself often poorly applied them overseas)




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