Good article. I would just add that the US took the lead in setting up the post-WWII political and economic order in part because it wanted to avoid a repeat of

Good article. I would just add that the US took the lead in setting up the post-WWII political and economic order in part because it wanted to avoid a repeat of the chaos of the previous two decades, and that had in fact been characteristic of much of the world for many thousands of years. And a great many other nations joined in this order because they had some similar motives. It is important to explain this because many on the left believe that the world was a peaceful, just, and prosperous paradise until Western imperialism came along, which is completely false. And lately many on the far right have been falsely claiming that the West was ditto a quite wonderful place until modernity.