An interesting, provocative piece from USS Clueless on the US de facto imposing a Pax Americana since WWII — but on its own terms, and with limited interest in multilateralism and compromise and consensus.
And the US came out of that with a deep distrust of European wisdom and European advice. No matter how much older and wiser they claimed to be, they hadn’t managed to do what we had ourselves: unite a huge area under a single government and live without war. We fought our Civil War, but that was 140 years ago and we’ve mastered living together ever since. And it took our meddling and our military occupation to make them live together without war.
It all seems terribly arrogant — but I’m having problems poking holes in it. And, perhaps, that arrogance is warranted. It’s very dangerous to have that sort of righteous arrogance, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
Well, I think that fails to take into account the fact that America began (with the exception of the indigenous peoples) as a bunch of culturally homogenous migrants, where Europe is populated by people who spent centuries – in many cases millennia – developing as culturally distinct ‘tribes’, who only began to but heads when they expanded into each other’s territory.
(Look at Australia; we’re in the same boat as the US – founded by one basic flow of migrants, uniting a huge area under one government, and we’ve never even had one Civil War. Admittedly because there’s not enough of us. ;))
Well, that explains the European problem, but doesn’t necessarily buy them anything.
I’m not sure your thesis holds up, nonetheless, regarding culturally homogenous migrants. We’ve had English, French, Dutch, Germans, all during the colonial period, and then distinct waves of Irish, Italian, etc., in the centuries since then.
Still, aside from the problems that distinct ethnic groups presented when the immigrated to the US (speaking as the child of both Italian and Irish immigrants), we’ve had plenty of head butting that never escalated into European-style conflicts.
Even in early colonial times, though we had some proxy wars (e.g., between the French and English areas of the eastern half of the continent), the various European colonial clusters by and large did not war with each other, per se, but on behalf of their European masters.
The biggest conflict of this sort in the US was the various wars between the East-Central largely-Anglo US and the Spanish/Mexican culture and state to the southwest. Even there, the last armed conflict took place about a century ago, and while Anglo-Hispanic relations have sometimes been significantly less than warm-n-fuzzy, I’ve seen no serious inclination of Mexico to war on the US to take back its lost territory, or fomenting rebellion among the Latino population in the US.