Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic. That’s giving it too much credit as it implies a degree of even Machiavellian intelligence. The British were imperialistic and they were actually kind of good at it. It was sheer idiocy, an exercise in spending massive amounts of money to build up our own enemies and negate our own supposed values, turning billions away from Western democracy and towa…
> I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic. US has been imperialistic from birth. Heck the revolutionary war was fought to secure our right to be imperialists and commit genocide against the natives. Our reason for existence is imperialism. Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world. > That’s giving it too much credit as it impli…
While this is logically inconsistent, it is not without a historical precedent. Ancient Athens, during the classical Greek period of the Peloponnesian War when Athens had its empire in the form of the Delian League, was one of the major slaver societies of the entire era, rivaling perhaps even Sparta in the magnitude of slave ownership (though Sparta's slavery was of a very unique form). This is all the while they were decrying Persia's imperial ambitions and touting their fight for liberty against the oppressor. Consider that ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy, and had one of the purest forms of democracy for what is considered an advanced civilization, to a fault — generals were getting executed for breaking the protocol on burial after the battle they had won (probably how they ended up losing the war). Given all that, one would be right to ask how they could justify promoting liberty and democracy on one hand, and being a slavery-based society on the other. The answer is always that a group of slavers simply does not consider the group that gets enslaved as worthy of having that liberty extended to them — that is the privilege of the "worthy" citizen class. In-group vs the out-group, tribalism and all that.
To go back to the sentence this comment replied to, it is unfortunately entirely believable that a group of racist slavers can be busy promoting liberty for people like themselves while enslaving those who they (conveniently choose to) see as lower than human. Logical consistency and evidence is not required, they are simply different in some way, and thus all is justified.