Pax Americana and Imperialism

Lately being one of the few Americans in my social circle, conversations take a serious turn, and despite being a liberal Californian I am asked to account for why the US has done the many notorious things it has. None of my explanations I could offer work into nice short sound bites, and often I hold my tongue for lack of desire to perform a lengthy lecture on history and philosophy. Yet, without going into said lecture suffice to say, I firmly believe that there is a quite complex web of reasons for why the US needs to exert its military power internationally (especially in the role of posturing to maintain regional peace), while such actions are certainly towards its own benefit and gain; it often benefits the rest of the world by the similar margins. My point being that Americans, while the argument can be made that we have our own selfish reasons, do things that benefits the global community, because no other superpower to serve as an alternative to do so, and thus the US has a moral imperative to use said superpower status to its full capacity to bring about common good when within its reasonable power to do so.

However while I've been a believer of the Pax Americana, and the US being a "disinterested" party utilizing military force for the betterment of the global community as a whole. This video of debate between Buckley and Chompsky from over 50 years ago has forced me to wonder whether the US should really bother. The hard truth is that perhaps our military ventures have been largely imperialistic. Chompsky does not really offer any better condition we should strive for, as his best techniques like Socrates has been merely to point out what we think to be commonly held truths to be not as truthful as we would like to believe. It can be inferred that the only moral application of force is in the defense of our own borders. However I don't really believe there's any practicality to the thought of regressing our forces to such a stance.

Full video of the Chompsky Buckley debate


A more recent speech on the same topic with references to Suharto, which I imagine holds some relevance for the members of my family who grew up in Indonesia.