> Someone on HN recommended Oliver Stone's Untold History of the Unites States. It's a really good look at the other end of this empire. It's obvious where his biases lie (check out his Putin interviews for some real ass kissing). Sometimes he says cringeworthy stuff like "this particularly American sin of xenophobia" (like really dude, you know this much about history and you're gonna say that), but it's great criticism and something lots of people would do well to watch.

He’s a great filmmaker, but I couldn’t get into this series. It really seemed to me that the goal was to spoon feed me ideas rather than to educate me and cause me to think. I love history and have a pretty dim view of US behavior towards the rest of the world (I have lived in the US all of my life), so it could have been a great match. The tactics felt very manipulative, however.

Documentaries shouldn’t use background music to inform me of who the hero is or who the bad guys are. They should be relatively dry and factual. This series is a fantastic example of how it should not be done.

No work of history is entirely straight. Even if the presentation is dry, if you read two different historians on the same era you're likely to get a wildly different account. Was the War of 1812 a rousing success that united Americans more than they had been and demonstrated the ability of a republic to wage war without compromising its principles, or a catastrophic, foolish decision? I've seen both takes.

I can only take it in doses, but it's invaluable from the perspective of if you wanted to represent the US as poorly as possible based on its own actions, how could you do it?

He's a guy you can't watch with your blinders on, but the raw amount of material there is, and the coverage of events like Iran in 53, Chile in 73 is a good counterpoint to anyone who wants to suggest the US cares particularly about democracy, or has only been a force for good, that kind of rhetoric.

Is there something similar that has less of a slant?

I find Chomsky's critiques of US Imperialism to be fairly dry, lucid and unemotional. However, it is difficult to perform a critique of America's moral standing and not be accused of having a slant, regardless of the sufficiency of your evidence or the strength of your argument.

Great post! It's always instructive to me how the primary purpose and usage of the US military from inception was truly centered around global commerce rather than defending the national territory.

Unburdened by a legacy of monarchy but well-acquainted with mercantilism, the merchant paternalists of the early US instead decided to focus on unfettered (for them) trade even if that meant fetters for others both iron and more structural.

I refer of course to the numerous examples stretching back to the Barbary Pirates, United Fruit etc. Military force was also used internally in the US to protect monied interests against more democratic forces, like the Ludlow Massacre.

The Barabary Pirates wasn't really a paternalist imperial action - the Pirates had a better navy than we did and were enslaving our sailors when they caught our ships, so it's funny that you talk about fetters for others.

I think you're missing my point that we didn't fight the Barbary Pirates because we particularly cared about them enslaving people (even our own) but because they were disrupting our commerce through the Mediterranean.

And the Barbary Pirates and American slave trade could and did coexist. You seem to be quite emotional on that point.

I'm not emotional about the Barbary Pirates. I simply think that pointing out that a country cared more about its merchant interests than another country's citizenry isn't exactly deeply insightful. Also, I don't agree that a country that had freed itself from monarchy less than a generation earlier can be described as 'unburdened by the legacy of monarchy' particularly given the origin of common law in the US.

To be a merchant paternalist, you generally need to be powerful. I thought it was important to point out that the United States was not powerful at that time, and barely managed to protect its merchant's interests some of the time. Your comment about merchant paternalists not caring about leaving others in fetters, both iron and structural, doesn't really apply to that particular conflict.

This was in some sense preordained, given that it was Shay's Rebellion that motivated the creation of a strong federal government and the Whiskey Rebellion was one of the earliest usages of the standing army. But the other obvious purpose was expanding the territory of the United States. Hogeland's Autumn of the Black Snake details how defeating Indians in Ohio was the impetus to create a standing army, an idea that was quite controversial.

> Roosevelt and Taft who otherwise were very moral men

What? Roosevelt was a despicable war monger, an extreme racist and he had little respect for the lives of his own soldiers (the more die the bigger the glory) or anybody else.

What's that based on?

Roosevelt was not a racist, at least not compared to his contemporaries. Booker Washington ate at the executive mansion (a first) with him. He gave African-Americans federal positions they had not previously held and tried to limit some of the lynching going on. He was not always right about this, see his actions in Brownsville, but he was way ahead of others. Wilson, for example, who was an actual racist, but hated war.

He was one of the few people who saw the rising power of the Japanese and respected them. He helped them and the Russians make peace and won a Nobel for that. Never actually went to war as president. He was an unabashed lover of war, but even learned that lesson (too late), when his son died in WW1. It broke him and he ended up dying within a couple years.

He was full of himself, but for someone full of himself, he actually did more for the working class with regulations and anti-trust action then any of the presidents preceding him.

He's guilty of some of what you say, but it's not by any means th full pictures, and ultimately we can only understand people within the context of their time. Roosevelt was way better than most.

TR wasn't the only, or best, progressive of that era, but he was a worthy champion of social and industrial justice.

> There were many holdouts and it took both world wars for the isolationist sentiment in the US to be completely broken.

This is seeing something of a revival right now and I highly doubt that it was ever 'completely broken', it merely got overruled by a substantial majority.

You're right to an extent, but there's some difference to it. Isolationism wasn't something poor xenophobes held, it was something people like Joe Kennedy held firmly to and that's 20 years after WW1 when the US went all out in getting involved in the global order.

Someone like Trump might talk some isolationist talk because it wins votes, but do you think those people who make hundreds of millions projecting American power really want that to stop? Not many people thought Brexit would happen, though, so maybe...

What Trump is doing and what Obama did to some extent is Retrenchment rather than Isolationism. US is hyper-extended and pulling back is pretty natural reaction after two decades of engagement in Middle East and Afghanistan.

That is not Isolationism, my rule of thumb is when US Navy vacates Diego Garcia (naval base in Indian Ocean), I will consider they are becoming Isolationist until then the talk of Isolationism just hot air.

Isolationism is much more than giving up foreign territories, it is as much about that as it is about solely looking after your own interests rather than a more global view. Places where you would see this are treaties, entities like NATO, the United Nations and so on and by that yardstick the US is becoming more isolationist by the day.

Diego Garcia being vacated would be a sign that America is no longer a world power by any measure. It might come to that, but not in the next 30 years or so.

The problem is that in politics you get called Isolationist as soon as you suggest sometime a little out of the 'allowed opinion' stream. Many so called 'isolations' are not against building a bunker around the US and doing nothing.

The United Nations for example can easily be engaged in even if you are against most US foreign policy.

> about solely looking after your own interests rather than a more global view

This 'global view' was basically about building a global order that the US could control. I was just another view about what in Americas best interest by a different group of elites.

> The problem is that in politics you get called Isolationist as soon as you suggest sometime a little out of the 'allowed opinion' stream.

That's not my experience.

> Many so called 'isolations' are not against building a bunker around the US and doing nothing.

That may be so. But many of them are. You can't build yourself up as the policeman of the world and then within the space of 6 months do a full 180 on that policy without getting called out on it.

> The United Nations for example can easily be engaged in even if you are against most US foreign policy.

Yes, but there are more ways to do this and the present day administration seems to have thrown 50 years of built up credit out with the remaining bathwater. Note that it is easy to destroy a reputation, it is very hard to put it back together again.

> This 'global view' was basically about building a global order that the US could control.

Agreed. But now we're headed towards a global order that the US definitely won't be able to control with China and Russia as dominant poles and the United States voting 'present' or even taking sides with Russia. This is going to have some significant consequences none of which will be pleasant.

> I[t] was just another view about what [is] in Americas best interest by a different group of elites.

That may be so. But the price for that changing viewpoint will not be paid by Americans.

> it is as much about that as it is about solely looking after your own interests rather than a more global view

I find it very, very hard to believe that the "global view" was ever more or different from "solely looking after your own interests". You may find nuance simply because there were and are many people involved with their own respective different ideas and goals, but even when something looked altruistic on the surface I'm sure you can always trace it back to someone benefiting financially. For example, giving aid but binding it to conditions leading to money returning to you (plus interest, when it's a loan). Altruistic would be giving up some of your own rights, e.g. on patents or IP, or giving the other party an advantage in trade - it does not even have to be giving "money" (which often just fuels corruption).

I see isolationism as the run up to the next world war, those who make 100's of millions projecting American power will make 100's of billions on the next big war.

I would question why the Mexican war and westward expansion, and Alaska and Hawaii don't count as empire-building. They are states now, but not at the time.

Because empire is what the british or europeans do. We were born out of freeing ourselves from an evil empire. So since birth, empire had negative connotations. To say we are an empire means we are just as evil as the british empire or the french empire or the spanish empire. But we are the beacon of freedom, liberty and democracy. So we can't be an empire...

Every nation lies to itself.