> Similar things could be said of all the once-great powers of Europe and Asia. They absolutely could but if two countries do X, it doesn't alter the fact that

> Similar things could be said of all the once-great powers of Europe and Asia. They absolutely could but if two countries do X, it doesn't alter the fact that they both did X. I'm from the UK and our colonial history was pretty grim, I fully accept it, I'm not ashamed of it (I wasn't around at the time) and I'm not proud of it (again not around at the time), if you don't understand where you come from then you miss out on a lot. The US is a large, prosperous economy with a productive workforce, it's simply not possible to deny that and no sane person would but it's not perfect either. The US benefited from a confluence of events (and some very smart leaders who created a pretty good system in aggregate) to capitalise on those events and drive an economy. Europe and it's major powers destroying their economic bases with two catastrophic wars certainly aided in that, the US was largely untouched domestically by WWII and at the end it had a vast production capacity, a skilled workforce, abundant natural resources and a world that was crying out for it's products and it capitalised on it well, the thing was it also had comparitively weak workers protection but it didn't matter when you could charge a lot for your goods because you where the only game in town. As someone from Britain while there is much I don't like about the US (primarily it's politicians but some other stuff as well), I have to give a huge amount of credit for what they did in the post war years, the Marshall plan and the rebuilding of Japan was an incredible thing for a country to do (even if it wasn't for altruistic reasons, it was still an impressive feat to bootstrap multiple savaged countries back to relative prosperity inside 20 years).