War monfering countries like US of A depend on a war/conflict somewhere in the world to keep the infrastructure going.
The colonisation of the Americas started in the 16th century, by 1890 the USA was the largest economy in the world. Their early significant wars were against the British for independence, and against their own with the Civil War. There were minor battles and wars up until WW1, when they came in late. And then the biggest of all was WWII, were the US lost many young men in Europe and many more in the Pacific and eye watering numbers against the Japanese.
If you want to compare which countries are war mongers, look at Europe. The reason WWI & WWII were called wars to end all wars was because Europe had been in constant war and battles for thousands of years. The great nations of Europe did not get rich from producing their own goods, they found it in their neighbours land. The sea merchants of the world were the English, the Dutch and the Spanish, plundering the world and even creating piracy.
List of conflicts in Europe
No one is innocent, none of the major countries free from death, but most strive for fairness and good by creating laws to protect.
Using only parts of history is like telling everyone the weather by looking out of a North window while the storm rides in from the South. We must look out of all the windows before making judgement.
The US is not perfect but since the end of WWII they have helped with world peace and international laws.
Give them some credit.
To truly understand the contours of the growing competition between the United States and China, look beyond the corridors of power in Washington and Beijing, past the tensions in the waters and skies around Taiwan, away from the bellicose rhetoric at international forums, and even off the tennis court, the new front opened by the trauma of Peng Shuai. Instead, look to the courtroom.
In the U.S. and much of the liberal West, the concept of the “rule of law” is vital to a properly functioning society—the idea (at least in theory) that the law is impartial, independent, and applied evenly and consistently to all, and that it serves to protect the innocent, including from the state. China’s leaders, however, follow the concept of the “rule by law,” in which the legal system is a tool used to assure Communist Party dominance; courts are forums for imposing the government’s will. The state can do just about anything it wants, and then find some helpful language in the “laws” to justify it.....
...For 75 years, the United States has been the world’s self-anointed rule writer and enforcer. Intent on preventing another global bloodletting on the scale of World War II, Washington attempted to craft a world order cemented in shared norms, with international institutions to enshrine and uphold them. Backing it all up was the might of the American military. That order has been imperfect, subject to abuse by an array of countries—America included—but it has kept a lid on big-power conflict, while spreading economic prosperity and democratic principles across much of the globe. It’s an order that, though somewhat tattered, the Biden administration is striving to maintain with, for instance, today’s Summit for Democracy.
But the American monopoly on rule writing is now facing its stiffest challenge since the fall of the Soviet Union. As China rises in stature, Beijing is promoting its own concepts about global governance, development, and international relations, grasping influence at institutions such as the United Nations to infuse these concepts into global discourse, and using its growing wealth and military might to contest the existing norms of the American world system....
...The main purpose of the West’s original policy of engagement with China was to avoid this very situation. By integrating Beijing into the U.S.-led system, the thinking went, the Chinese leadership would see its benefits and come to support it. On a certain level, the plan succeeded. China has been a major beneficiary of the American order—perhaps the biggest of all. The security, trade, and cross-border investment fostered by the U.S. order propelled China’s rise from poverty, while Beijing eagerly immersed itself in U.S.-backed institutions such as the World Trade Organization.
Yet today, China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, appears to consider the U.S. system a constraint on Chinese power. For a proud autocracy, the American order can seem an unfriendly, even threatening place, one where liberal political values reign supreme, and the Chinese form of government is perceived as illegitimate, while Chinese companies and officials are vulnerable to foreign sanction and Chinese ambitions are hemmed in. From Xi’s perspective, it is critical that Beijing rewrite the rules to better suit its interests and, more broadly, those of authoritarian states. Simply, Xi intends to flip the global hierarchy, placing illiberal governments and ideals at its apex.
Xi “wants to dominate the rule of law,” Jerome Cohen, a longtime expert in Chinese law, told me. Xi believes that “you have to have rules that suit the interest of the majority of countries,” and “he sees the Anglo-Americans as being a minority now,” Cohen continued. “That minority should be governed by the autocracies of the world who are amenable to the Chinese point of view.”
The U.S. has faced a similar challenge before, from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But because China is more integrated into the American order, especially economically, than the Soviets ever were, it presents a more dangerous threat. Beijing is attacking the world order in a pincer movement. From the outside, it markets its ideas, governance, and development model as superior to the West’s; from the inside, it works within the very institutions and networks that bind the U.S. order together.
Take, for instance, the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s pet program that finances and builds railways, power stations, and other infrastructure in developing nations. This undertaking is an effort to change the way international development is done by offering an alternative to the established practices of the Western powers and their institutions, such as the World Bank. Beijing’s state banks generally don’t follow the norms on lending to poor nations designed (after much trial and error) by other major creditor countries, nor has China participated in processes to manage that debt, such as the Paris Club. Instead, Chinese lending is based on China’s rules, often with less transparent terms and weaker standards on labor practices, corruption, and environmental protection. Kristen Cordell, a development policy expert, wrote in a 2020 report on Belt and Road that “the willingness of China to abide by international rules and processes for these investments has been secondary to its interest of shaping norms for its favor.”.....