The reason nation-building is supposedly "woven into our DNA" is because empire, and because sociopaths are irresistibly attracted to the power that an empire gives them.
The idea that they could have this power and not play Risk with it is inconceivable. To return to your addict analogy, it's like leaving a giant unguarded pile of uncut honk in front of an cokehead and expecting him not to indulge.
I don’t believe the US has ever been serious about nation building. What we are interested in doing is expanding markets for US goods, extracting resources on the most favorable terms, and having complete control of their financial system through our control of the IMF and World Bank. One only needs to review our history throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (esp. Haiti), and our conduct in post-Soviet Russia to see what truly matters to our foreign policy elite.
"Germany and Japan succeeded as much as they did because they had already been prosperous, unified nation-states long before the war and both had even had experience with their own democratic institutions."
It seems to me that the dirty little secret of post-World War II Europe is the fact that the United States and Britain kept the Nazi-collaborationist bureaucracies of Europe (and the collaborators with Imperial Japan in East Asia) in place following the war. Certified mass-murderers kept their jobs across Germany and France and the United States quickly went about revising the historical record in order to clean up their reputations because we could count on their loyalty to the US during the Cold War.
Contrast that with Eastern Europe. Stalin purged every Eastern European government of anyone who collaborated with the Nazis. As a result, the states in these countries had to be rebuilt, and yes, they became police states. Nazi-free police states.
Our skewed mythology around World War II is the only historical frame of reference that our elites have. For the sake of getting them to wake up and smell the roses, perhaps it is time that we started telling the truth about the reconstructed governments of Japan and Germany: we didn't "turn them into democracies," the war criminals all kept their jobs.
Speaking of Germany and Japan you say "both had even had experience with their own democratic institutions." Sorry, I don't recall the Japanese having much experience with democratic institutions. the Meiji constitution had many democratic trappings, but only 1.!% of the population had the vote (according to Wikipedia). In practice, the Japanese people had far less political freedom than Germans had under Bismarck's empire, not to mention Weimar.
The reason nation-building is supposedly "woven into our DNA" is because empire, and because sociopaths are irresistibly attracted to the power that an empire gives them.
The idea that they could have this power and not play Risk with it is inconceivable. To return to your addict analogy, it's like leaving a giant unguarded pile of uncut honk in front of an cokehead and expecting him not to indulge.
I don’t believe the US has ever been serious about nation building. What we are interested in doing is expanding markets for US goods, extracting resources on the most favorable terms, and having complete control of their financial system through our control of the IMF and World Bank. One only needs to review our history throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (esp. Haiti), and our conduct in post-Soviet Russia to see what truly matters to our foreign policy elite.
"Germany and Japan succeeded as much as they did because they had already been prosperous, unified nation-states long before the war and both had even had experience with their own democratic institutions."
It seems to me that the dirty little secret of post-World War II Europe is the fact that the United States and Britain kept the Nazi-collaborationist bureaucracies of Europe (and the collaborators with Imperial Japan in East Asia) in place following the war. Certified mass-murderers kept their jobs across Germany and France and the United States quickly went about revising the historical record in order to clean up their reputations because we could count on their loyalty to the US during the Cold War.
Contrast that with Eastern Europe. Stalin purged every Eastern European government of anyone who collaborated with the Nazis. As a result, the states in these countries had to be rebuilt, and yes, they became police states. Nazi-free police states.
Our skewed mythology around World War II is the only historical frame of reference that our elites have. For the sake of getting them to wake up and smell the roses, perhaps it is time that we started telling the truth about the reconstructed governments of Japan and Germany: we didn't "turn them into democracies," the war criminals all kept their jobs.
Speaking of Germany and Japan you say "both had even had experience with their own democratic institutions." Sorry, I don't recall the Japanese having much experience with democratic institutions. the Meiji constitution had many democratic trappings, but only 1.!% of the population had the vote (according to Wikipedia). In practice, the Japanese people had far less political freedom than Germans had under Bismarck's empire, not to mention Weimar.