True,US is not an Imperial builder, nor does it wage war for territory.Where is the nececessity for wars when you can overrun Natives with your military?Why should you wage a war when you can control countries by Dollars?
US does not wage war-it just entered Vietnam, to help people out.
It helped Kuwait by moving in Iraq .It is helping Afganistan right now.
It is trying to help Pakistan as well.
Yes, it does not wage a war directly unless attacked directly as in Pearl Harbour.It just acts as a catalyst when local conditions are conducive to US’s economic benefit,by aiding both parties against each other, some times helping one,sometimes another and many a times both at the same time.
Story:
PARIS — He’s in there somewhere, under the gilded dome of Les Invalides in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. The Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, is entombed by six coffins in what has to be the most spectacular sarcophagus in all the City of Light.
I stared at this extravagance of marble and mortality not long ago, thought about Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia, Italy and Prussia, the wars that briefly remade Europe, and realized that I owed a considerable part of my heritage as a citizen of the American West to the Little Corporal in the coffin.
Distracted as he was in trying to build an empire, Napoleon looked across the Atlantic and decided he had little use for the mid-section of a distant continent. Needing cash for conquest, he then sold the French holdings for a pittance to the fledgling United States.
Putting aside the fact that these lands had Native Americans living on them, with deep attachments and rights of sovereignty of their own, the United States got one of the greatest real estate deals of all time from the French.
For barely 5 cents an acre, the U.S. picked up more than 800,000 square miles in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the stroke of a pen at Thomas Jefferson’s behest, and without the loss of a single life, America doubled in size.
We were wary, following the advice of Jefferson and others, of ceaseless and senseless overseas wars. Wars for territory. Wars for defense. Wars for revenge. Wars because one religion was better than another. This was not our way. We didn’t meddle. We fought “good wars,” against imperial occupiers like Great Britain and, much later, the Nazis.
And we were slow to rouse, intervening only when called to the rescue. That was — perhaps still is — our narrative as a people.
From that peaceful triumph with France, you pivot to the present day, and wonder how we will fit what are likely to be our two longest wars into this story. The United States has been in Afghanistan coming up on a decade. Iraq is not far behind.
http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/napoleons-dynamite/?8ty&emc=ty
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