Of course there are lots of exceptions to that, like protracted and pointless wars in the Middle East, but those are not fundamental artifacts of the conception

Of course there are lots of exceptions to that, like protracted and pointless wars in the Middle East, but those are not fundamental artifacts of the conception of America; they are side-effects of bad culture today. This is fundamentally the same argument that communists use when they are asked about Stalin or Ceausescu. I dislike the notion that all bad parts of an arbitrary system can be explained away by saying "Well, that's not really the system. The real system has zero-latency networks and functional immortality and no-one ever cries." The "fundamental artifacts of the conception of America" are infinitely less important than what America actually is. The same applies to communism, anarchism, and C++.