There are a few historical forces at work that are pertinent to the questions. The first is the rise in the 18th and 19th centuries of a world order - a truly global economic and (in a very weak sense, but nonetheless existing) political world order. This gave rise to a new phenomenon, the Great Powers, and the competition between them for control over this new world order. Major powers have existed throughout human history but even the greatest among them, the 13th century Mongolian Empire, was really just an exaggerated regional power. Powers like China, Inca, Mali, Moghul India, Abbasid Arabia, Cyrus' Persia, Rome, the Aztec, etc. etc. etc were fierce and amazing civilizations but very limited by technology to regions. The European powers were the first to take that to the next level, to a global level, and to begin to construct truly global economic, logistical and military mechanisms. Unfortunately, the European Great Powers' competition for control over that world order culminated in two suicidal European (civil) wars, which we call "World War I" and "World War II." Japan's rise and participation in these wars is the first hint of the spread of this world order, and its willingness to include any country as a Great Power - not just Europeans. In the meantime, before those self-destructive wars, Europe created global standards of everything from diplomacy to measurement (the metric system) to currency conversion to finance to international law to weather and climate measurement to shipping and commercial rules to etc. etc. etc. Now of course much of all that was borrowed from other civilizations, but it was the Europeans who globalized them and made them universal standards. This applies to good stuff like the discipline of science and to less good stuff like the African slave trade. We still today live very much on that European-contrived system of globalization, though it continues to be tweaked, challenged and developed. (Historian Jan T. Gross and former U.S. NSA adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski both in the 1970s referred to the Soviet Union as the "Spoiler State" because, in having tried and failed from 1930s-1960s to build a successful alternative global system to the European/ Western one, it resorted instead by the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 80s to petty attempts to undermine and destroy the Western global model.)
The U.S. was traditionally an isolationist state before the World Wars, rarely sending its armies beyond North America. (The U.S. did frequently intervene in the affairs of Central American countries, occupying Vera Cruz in a dispute with revolutionary Mexico in 1914 for instance, and in a fit of imperialism in the 1890s the U.S. seized Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico - but these were the exceptions.) Also, throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Americans had fought for control of North America with the British, Indians, French, Spanish and Canadians, but these were considered home turf wars. The first time American soldiers would invade either Europe or Africa would be 1805 when U.S. Marines invaded North Africa against the Barbary Pirates. The next time would be World War I. The experience of World War I shocked many Americans and despite the immense popularity of Woodrow Wilson and his ideas at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was easily out-maneuvered politically at the conference and when he came home, Americans opted (by rejecting joining the League of Nations) out of any further cooperation or involvement with Europe. The U.S. pulled back from the world and avoided alliances. The Great Depression proved that global economic integration required some sort of global cooperation, but the U.S. still dragged its feet about joining World War II until forced into a decision in 1941.
The Franklin Roosevelt vision for the postwar world was of a collection of regional powers meeting in the United Nations and discussing their differences there, and meting out solutions through the UN. Roosevelt was utterly committed to the UN, though it reflected the mindset of its day - all countries of the world would participate, but some were more equal than others, and so a permanent security council of Great Powers would have ultimate authority. Roosevelt envisioned that as soon as World War II ended, the U.S. would pull back all its forces and go back to a relatively isolationist standing, with the exception that the U.S. would work with other great powers to ensure peace. This was one of the reasons, for instance, that Roosevelt insisted that China be on the permanent security council, as an Asian representative and as a counter-weight to Japan. (The U.S. actually had a strongly pro-Chinese foreign policy in the 20th century prior to Mao tse-Tung, but that's another story.)
The trade-off in Roosevelt's policy was that there would be no world policeman; the UN was built to ensure the integrity of country's rights, but that meant regardless of whether a country was a democracy or a dictatorship or a crazed theocracy. It is this aspect of the UN that modern China most strongly supports, the rejection of interference in other states' affairs, even if they're murdering their own citizens. That's the price of the Roosevelt model, the rejection of any notion of universal human rights. In the UN model, countries are more important than people. For those recently victimized by (mostly Western) imperialism and colonialism, that is a crucial element to the UN, but it ignores their own crimes - such as China's seizure and suppression of local culture in Tibet or the Uighur lands, or Indonesia's seizure of East Timor after Australia set it free, and the subsequent massacres of East Timorites by Indonesian military forces, etc. etc. etc.The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted belatedly in 1948 by the Western Powers as a challenge to the communist world, and while most of the pro-Soviet states signed it, it has obviously only had a superficial impact on our world. The UN's first order of business is the business of states - not their citizens. Indeed, Roosevelt's vision recognized this weakness but still accepted it when it was confronted with Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe; at the Tehran and Yalta conferences, Roosevelt effectively told Stalin that he knew the U.S. could do little to stop the Soviets from establishing an empire in Eastern Europe (a violation of the Atlantic Charter, to which Stalin was a signatory) and so Roosevelt would simply look the other way and ignore Soviet violations of earlier agreements re: Eastern Europe in exchange for Soviet participation and cooperation in the UN. Again, the Roosevelt vision was of major regional powers cooperating globally to keep the peace; what each of those powers did within their own realms was to be their business, no matter how gruesome or nasty. And of course it's easy to be critical of that aspect of Roosevelt's vision, but maybe any realistic approach to peace had to start with baby steps - stop the world's major powers from waging wars against one another first, then move on to other issues later. Just playing Devil's Advocate there.
Roosevelt died in April, 1945 however, before the war ended. There was a famous incident where new U.S. president Harry Truman, completely uninformed about Roosevelt's policies, severely reprimanded visiting Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov just 11 days after Roosevelt's death over brutal Soviet policies in occupied Poland, only to retract those statements days later and apologise after discovering Roosevelt's "green light" to the Soviet take overs in Eastern Europe. In any event, Roosevelt's policies still ruled for some time after his death. Literally on the day the war ended in Europe, American ships carrying supplies to the allies in Europe turned around mid-ocean and headed back to the U.S., while plans to decommission the 12 million American soldiers serving around the world were drawn up. There was still the war against Japan and there would be occupation duty, but these were factored in. By 1950, there were only about 1 million troops in the U.S. military, mostly spread around the world in occupation duty. However, the challenge to Roosevelt's ideals came in the form of the Cold War. Without getting bogged down in how the Cold War started, it was seen by Washington as a fundamental challenge to free states, as yet another imperial take-over attempt akin to Hitler. Washington's first impulse was to sit back and support the global leader, Britain, but Britain underwent a sort of slow-moving imperial implosion after World War II, first handing the Greek, Turkish and Iranian anti-communist crises over to the Americans, then the loss of Palestine and India, and finally the startling announcement that the UK couldn't afford the small British occupation force in Germany, prompting the U.S. to arrange for the Western powers to pool their occupations zones together to form the BRD/ West Germany in 1948-1949. Add to these the Soviet challenges - the creation of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin crises, the Turkish and Iranian crises,etc., and by 1949 you had Americans like George Kennan and George Marshall saying "We have to do something." The Korean War was the final straw that convinced the Americans - against many voices at home urging that the U.S. remain isolationist - to start building up its armed forces and start building alliances around the world to counter what Washington saw as Soviet imperialist expansionism. For the first time in American history, for instance, there was an active conscription program in the 1950s (until 1974) for the military in peace time.
This is the genesis of the "American Empire" that exists today, and the American role as global cop that so many resent. The good news - or bad news, depending on how one sees things - is that it is slowly going away. One side effect of the Pax Americana has been a massive surge in global trade - globalization - facilitated by the U.S. in a million ways. For instance, the U.S. has worked closely with the SEATO countries in southeast Asia to help police the Malacca Strait against rampant pirates for decades. If the U.S. pulls back - and the old isolationist impulses have never completely gone away; there are American nationalists who argue that the U.S. should never have fought in the World Wars, and the U.S. military should never leave U.S. soil - then you will see a large drop in global trade, travel and shipping will become much more expensive, and global investment will fall as many borderline regions become far less stable (without the threat of U.S. or UN intervention). China today is trying to develop an alternative to the Western global model, even as it benefits immensely from the Western model; that is born of Chinese nationalism that sees itself as the rightful center of the world. Indeed, after a few years of happily watching the relative decline of American influence in Asia with the rise of China, several local countries (including some not aligned currently with Washington such as Vietnam) began requesting c. 2009-2010 a stronger American military commitment to Southeast Asia out of a fear of growing Chinese militarism and assertiveness in its economic and territorial claims. There are certainly victims of the American world order - during the Cold War in particular, Washington (and its allies) often supported some nasty local regimes across the Third World so long as they were anti-communist/ anti-Soviet. Against its own better judgment, the U.S. also often supported lingering European colonial regimes in the name of anti-communism, blackening the U.S. image in many Third World countries. And in many respects, the military-industrial complex feared by U.S. President Eisenhower came into being, although it is weaker today than many suspect and its funding is maintained through nationalist scare-mongering rather than Hollywood-style smoky backroom deals.
As U.S. influence recedes - which is not to mean the same thing as U.S. power receding - the U.S. finds itself once again facing the Roosevelt option, of a world order driven by cooperation of regional powers through the UN. A complication with that vision by now is that with the European experience of decolonization and the global terror of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, a human rights movement arose in the West that closely monitors and decries human rights violations both by the West, its allies, and the entire world. The Roosevelt vision of a U.S. pullback requires that those human rights ideals be largely abandoned, at least outside of cooperative countries. Also, as a few have cited, for the pain and suffering inflicted by the Pax Americana on some peoples, it has led to a world with dramatically fewer wars. The Roosevelt vision only tries to stop major wars between the Great Powers, sort of like the Concert of Europe in the mid-19th century after the Napoleonic Wars. It's not about trying to stop all wars. We need to be thinking about these things because this post-American world is now passing and a multi-polar world is rapidly approaching. We can plan to make it at least marginally peaceful and beneficial for most, but we need to be discussing these issues now. Are you prepared for many Rwandas and Bosnia-style attempted genocides, for many more wars in Africa, for a low-investment environment where risk is far higher to manage than today, in exchange for a reduced American presence in the world? Europe's military forces for instance are quite frankly pathetic, and while the competition of the great powers is in the past for Europe, the EU and its members have demonstrated many times since the 1990s that it has neither the will nor means to undertake anything above the smallest and quickest military engagements. The EU has repeatedly failed to even define its own interests in the face of security threats, much less actually actively move to defend them. This is one of the reasons that even anti-Bush Eastern Europeans continued to want a strong American military presence or relationship with Europe; Poles and Estonians don't trust that Englishmen, Spaniards or Dutchmen will really come to their aid in the event of some security emergency. These are thoughts to keep in mind as we move slowly out of the Pax Americana, into the unknown, for better or worse.
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