One can scoff at such naïveté and sentimentality, just as many Americans scoffed at the soaring rhetoric of the second Bush inaugural with its promise to eliminate tyranny and promote democracy around the world. Nevertheless, such ideals about the U.S. obligation to less fortunate peoples have always played a role in shaping American policy and mobilizing the public support to permit its implementation. The sincerely held notion of American mission helps to explain the apparent contributions in the U.S. approach to its role in the world: we’re reluctant and embarrassed to pursue raw power for its own sake, but we can be shockingly aggressive, even militant when it comes to promoting democracy, free markets, and Christianity.

Of course, the pursuit of such ideals can also bring financial benefits that enrich the Republic and its populace. In a fascinating new book called “Day of Empire,” Professor Amy Chua of Yale Law School, analyzes the emergences of a succession of “hyper-powers,” each of which dominated the globe in its own era. Concerning the Untied States she writes: “America built its world dominance not through conquest but commerce….America for most of the nineteenth century ‘contented itself with carving out….(an) ‘empire of the seas’- an informal empire based on trade and influence…Even today, as John Steele Gordon writes, “if the world is becoming rapidly Americanized as once it became Romanized, the reason lies not in our weapons, but in the fact that others want what we have and are willing, often eager, to adopt our ways in order to have them too.”

While the “soft power” of US culture and corporations ultimately wields more influence that our military strength, America has pursued numerous “humanitarian” interventions over the centuries that in no way serve either our financial and strategic self-interest. The recent military missions in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo brought scant reward to the United States while managing, with varying degrees of success, to save lives. Nearly a century earlier, the Boxer uprising shook China and, as Max Boot writes, “America joined in a multinational expedition to rescue the besieged legations in Peking. While the Europeans and Japanese participants were determined to carve out their own spheres of influence in China, the United States pointedly committed itself to maintaining free trade for all – the Open Door.”

Unlike other dominant powers in world history, the United States today remains less focused on enhancing its own sway than on promoting the stability and institutions that have allowed it to flourish. As Amy Chua concludes: “Even when the United States invades and occupies other countries, the goal today is never annexation but, at least ostensibly, an eventual military withdrawal, leaving behind a constitutional (and hopefully pro-American) democracy.”

COLD WAR CONTEXT

America’s good intentions do not necessarily produce good results. Even in the noble and necessary struggle against Nazism in World War II, US troops proved themselves capable of appalling cruelty. As Stanford professor Norman Naimark recently noted in the Weekly Standard (November 12, 2007): “Some five million Germans died during World War II, including 1.8 million civilians. Allied bombing campaigns, including the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg, destroyed German cities and killed hundreds of thousands of their inhabitants, among them 75,000 children under 14….Many thousands of Germans starved to death, especially in the American Rheinwiesen lager (Rhine Meadow camps); others were beaten and horribly tortured. American soldiers sometimes shot Germans, usually SS and other uniformed Nazis, where they were found, and executed others without trial in detention camps. No American (or German) should have any illusions about the violence carried out by GI’s and their officers against disarmed and interned German soldiers, policemen, and even civilians at the end of the war. The “greatest generation” committed crimes against captured Germans that make Abu Ghraib look like child’s play.”

Naimark readily concedes, however, that it makes no sense to consider such atrocities outside the context of the wider war, just as it makes no sense to condemn the US atom bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki without reference to their ultimate life-saving role for both Americans and Japanese (who otherwise would have perished by the millions in a fight-to-the-death defense against a conventional invasion of the home islands).

In the same way, it’s impossible to indict America for its vigorous and sometimes overweening international role in the period 1945-1989 without consideration of the multi-generational, world-wide struggle against the aggressive, unspeakably brutal force of world wide Communism. In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 2005, Sir Harold Pinter smears the United States for causing “hundreds of thousands of deaths” with its support for “right wing military dictatorship” in “Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.” At no point, however, does Pinter remind his listeners that every one of the “dictatorships” he mentioned played a role in the larger struggle against the Soviet Union and its repeatedly announced intentions (“We will bury you” warned Nikita Khrushchev) to destroy the United States and its way of life. America-bashers may insist that the Russian Empire never constituted a real threat to the west, and the militant anti-Communists merely conjured up the specter of the Red Menace in order to exploit fear in the service of their own power-mad ends, but the corpses piled high in much of Europe, Asia and Latin America provide unimpeachable evidence to the contrary. “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,” the 1997 compilation of research edited by French academician Stephane Courtois, counts some 100 million victims of communist murder during the Twentieth Century. This record, largely ignored by too many contemporary Americans, may not excuse every American misdeed of the Cold War period, but it can certainly help to explain them.

Chile, for example, usually constitutes a favorite demonstration of American perfidy for those who seek to discredit the United States. In 1970, Dr. Salvador Allende became the world’s first democratically elected Marxist President and immediately launched a radical program of nationalization, wealth distribution, and social reform. The nation faced dire and increasingly violent divisions even before the CIA-directed coup in 1973, with more moderate Chileans fearing the imminent imposition of an unshakable, implacable Castro style dictatorship. Instead, Chile endured 17 years of authoritarian, right-wing, pro-American dictatorship from General Augusto Pinochet, with ruthless persecution of suspected dissidents combined with audacious free-market reforms. For all his brutality, Pinochet succeeded in creating the most dynamic economy in Latin America and under American pressure he allowed a referendum on his own rule in 1988, then gave up power altogether less than two years later. Today Chile continues to benefit from a growing economy and stable democratic institutions, with a freely elected socialist President. While the international left regularly and repeatedly blames the United States for installing Pinochet, America gets no credit for its decisive role in his removal. In the same way, the critics assault the US for backing the Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos, but never praise American policy makers for securing his peaceful removal and supporting the more democratically-minded “People Power” revolution of Corazon Aquino.

Above all, those who concentrate on Cold War excesses of US foreign policy avoid the most significant point of them all: the strategies and sacrifices, doctrines and deceptions employed by the United States resulted in the most remarkable victory in our history, with nearly 500 million human beings liberated from Stalinist tyranny. The results everywhere, in terms of vastly improved living standards and fresh blessings of freedom, should speak for themselves.

So should the restraint, modesty and generosity of the USA in responding to the collapse of its long-time Soviet rival. With America for the first-time enjoying matchless power in a suddenly uni-polar world, the new “hyper-power” made no attempt to abuse its standing. As Amy Chua writes: “Here was a society with unthinkable destructive capacity, facing no countervailing power. Yet it seemed to go without saying that the Untied States would not use its unrivaled force for territorial expansion or other aggressive imperialist ends…. When it came to U.S. military might, the most controversial issues were whether the United States should intervene abroad for purely humanitarian reasons (as in Kosovo or Rwanda) and what America should do with its ‘peace dividend,’ the billions of dollars the United States would no longer be spending on its military.”

The best way to put America’s place in the world in proper context is to call to mind a famous sequence from the most beloved Hollywood movie of them all. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” small town banker George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) contemplates a Christmas Eve suicide before guardian angel Clarence provides the ultimate life-affirming vision. He provides the disheartened hero with a dark, dysfunctional view of the town of Bedford Falls if he’d never drawn breath, as the community would have taken shape without his good deeds and benevolent influence. With that sharper perspective, George can go home to his loving family to celebrate the holiday with gratitude and joy.

Those who condemn the United States should perform a thought experiment involving a global “Bedford Falls Vision.” Imagine that the United States had never become a world power, or never existed at all. Would the ideals of democracy and free markets wield the same power in the world? Would murderous dictatorships have claimed more victims – or fewer? Would the community of nations strain under the lash of Nazism, or Communism, or some vicious combination of both? Would multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy flourish anywhere on earth without inspiration from the ground-breaking example of the USA? Would the threat of jihadist violence and resurgent Islamic fundamentalist menace humanity more grievously, or not at all?

No one can provide definitive, authoritative answers to such hypotheticals, but merely confronting the questions should help put the American role in more complete context. As George Bailey’s view of an alternate reality convinced him “It’s a Wonderful Life,” even the briefest contemplation of a world without America should persuade us that “It’s a Wonderful Nation” – in fact, the Republic rightly recognized as the Greatest Nation on God’s Green Earth.