Of course when it comes to US imperialism:

[halialkers]

The President most directly responsible for giving the USA the tools to level countries already weakened by the foolish choices of the Soviet Union and their own tinpot dictator, respectively (the USA didn't make Saddam decide to redo that land grab Iran did do with US help at his expense, he made that dipshit decision on his own) is warm fuzzy peanut farming Jimmy fucking Carter:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/dont-take-the-oil-time-ditch-the-carter-doctrine-19310

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/andrew-j-bacevich/carter-doctrine-30

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/10/13/the-carter-doctrine-middle-east-strategy-past-its-prime-the-carter-doctrine-middle-east-strategy-past-its-prime/xkDcRIPaE68mFbpnsUoARI/story.html

The reasons are fairly simple, of course. Dipshit Jimmy the Peanut Farmer was the only man in the entire world shocked that decades of US malfeasance in swelling SAVAK like a tick on the blood of Iranians and sustaining the Pahlavi dynasty ended in a bloodbath and the downfall of 6,000 years of monarchies in the Iranian territories. He was the only man in the world with any knowledge of what Afghanistan means to any Russian Empire worth its salt that saw a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a shock and something worth reviving the Cold War and the arms race over.

Fuckwit Jimmy wore sweaters and saw one of the eleventy-billion horsemen of the apocalypse who present at least five intersectional apocalypses (how appropriate for the century of intersectionality) which can't be untangled in several cases without snarling other would-be causes) was a crisis, and he spends his post-Presidency negotiating a deal to give North Korea nuclear reactors to forestall a North Korea with nuclear ICBMs (which as we all know was a total success because North Korea is entirely reasonable and the Corpse Kingdom would never, ever use nuclear reactors to build ICBMs and arm them with nuclear weapons for any reasons whatsoever) and building houses everything else he did was also positive.

Yes, yes, of course.

So having geared the USA on those lines, the USA promptly forgot this and that Ronald Reagan's genius ideas included arming the very regime in Iraq the USA later overthrew and willingly letting it gas dissidents at home:

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/30/us-had-key-role-in-iraq-buildup/133cec74-3816-4652-9bd8-7d118699d6f8/?utm_term=.90c3efa352c1

And trading arms to Iran to finance those nun-raping moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers (insofar as they were slavers and rapists that's actually true but not the way he intended it):

https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/iran-contra-affair

And of course subsidizing at the height of the War on Drugs Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the chief recipient of US aid and the greatest narco-terrorist in the world at the time:

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-afghanistan-insurgent-20160515-snap-story.html

Mind you, literally the height of the War on Drugs, so of course a narco-terrorist is bosom buddies with President Alzheimer's and his Legion of Doom.

George W. Bush, of course, expands on the endless bombing raids Bubba the Womanizer did to launch the disaster of Iraq after repeating the same mistake every other war in Afghanistan before him did of forgetting what starts well there never ends well.

The USA, for extra shits and giggles originally viewed the bloated sacred cow military of endless wars and endless waste we have as at one point un-American and it is actually unconstitutional that it exists in the form it does.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/07/29/both-james-madison-and-the-anti-federalists-were-right-about-standing-armies/#5978e6a675a0

https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24671
So at the end of the day, a country that was founded by slaveowning rapists who fucked their sister in law to rape her as an underage girl and used the power of the Presidency to order genocidal wars of aggression and pursue their slaves through the streets who hated standing armies now has the most widespread military machine in the world and the biggest empire in all of world history. Like all empires it is built on pyramids of skulls, avarice, waste, the squalid Ozymandian "Look on my works ye mighty and despair" relics of the endless grinding means to employ the very thing (well, other than a black President with a law degree) they would have most feared.

America has never been great, it's expanded from sea to shining sea on a pyramid of skulls stacked over a river of blood. It's waged wars of brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression, and persecution. It is a society of squalidness, of being barbarous and rooted in barbarity, of a carnival wherein rule of law is replaced by rule of lynch mob and American slavery defined American freedom as a boot stamping on a black face forever, lest whiteness have to honor its own rhetoric in a fashion it was never intended.

The American Empire is not so much more evil than what has gone before, merely more efficient and on a larger scale because it has computers and drones where other empires had Tommy Atkins who:

When the women come out to kill what remains/take a rifle and blow out yer brains/and go to yer gawd like a soldier

in the age
 
Where we have got/ the Maxim gun /and they have not.

And his ilk in the other armies. We replace the hard-hit and hard-living soldier with a machine and a kid with a joystick who instead of blowing up pixels in showers of gore blows up a real person with the same stake in it.

Yet Tacitus is wrong about the true secret of empire. It is that all empires fall, all glory is lasting, and in the future the American Empire shall vanish and leave its monumental empire of bases as an eyesore across the world, and in this too it shall be like all the others.

And the second gag is will we be any more repentant of our crimes than our predecessors? Not a chance in Hell. No fallen empire's survivors are ever repentant of the blood they soak themselves in to the bridle of horses even as those they wrong cry out: 

"How long O Lord, shall the blood of our brothers cry out to Heaven and await justice and revenge?" 

Comments

[johnny9fingers]

Ronnie was a bit of a liability, despite the hagiographers being prepared to elevate his bowel movements to holy relics.

Kipling said it right in his own uncompromising fashion.

But you are wrong in one respect. America has been great; sporadically, true, but great nevertheless. Culturally as well as militarily.

The biggest artistic voice of the C20th is the voice of the Black American underclass: the greatest art of the C20th is almost all based on the flat 5th, and tension between major and minor thirds - the notes of the scale which are the blues - the notes of choice of Black American folk musicians. In the century of popular media, when sheet-music, then recordings were at their height the most widespread and democratic art form patronised by the masses, the biggest notes were American.

Cinema was American led. In the other visual arts America competed, if competition is a valid idea in art.

And the rest of us couldn't have beaten Uncle Adolph without you. America has a mixed narrative, as do all other nation-states.

We criticise our polities to improve them - but improve them we must.

[halialkers]

Greatness is always an artifact of power and the ruthlessness to wield it. Europe didn't speak French for centuries because French is aesthetically a perfect or pure language, it spoke French for centuries because the entire rest of Europe vs. France was a stalemate or French victories and the French thus made their power and their reputation that way.

American greatness may stem from what you say it is, but without the American Empire won in fire and blood and genocide none of that would matter very much.

[garote]

I'm not entirely sure what your thesis is here, except maybe, America Bad, but I would at least like to make one point of order:

I assume the peanut farmer you are referring to is Jimmy Carter. He did not have any intention of restarting the cold war, and in fact he ran his campaign on a clearly expressed desire to reduce the nuclear arsenal and accelerate the stand-down with Russia. But upon taking office and laying out his plans, he found he was opposed on multiple fronts, including military advisers, congress, and large chunks of the American electorate who were more concerned with the cost of gas than arms reduction. He had to abandon almost all his plans and reframe his goal as pursuing new military technology development, aspiring to make warfare "safer".

With the specific case of North Korea: they had nuclear material already. The question was whether they would kick out inspectors and immediately attempt to weaponize it in what looked like a very imminent war. Carter went there with Clinton's approval, and the deal he negotiated was surely no worse than the shit-show that would have happened without him.