RF wrote:ede144 wrote:I believe the founders made it well. Compare the numbers of wars in the US with numbers in Germany, France and UK.
Regards
Ede
Well, are we including all the conflicts initiated by the USA? The US was the only country out of the four above to have a bloody civil war since 1787.
Germany in its lifespan initiated two wars that grew into world wars.
France in that lifespan declared war once - in 1939.
The UK declared war twice - on Germany. The other wars involving the UK were started by the other side, for example Italy, Japan and Argentina commencing hostilities against British held territory.
The USA by comparison has started wars with France, Britain, Mexico, Spain, Germany and has intervened in numerous armed conflicts within Latin America and in Africa and the Middle East, not to mention intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia. It has threatened to go to war with PR China in defence of Taiwan.
..... You've actually left quite a few conflicts off your list - particularly with respect to Great Britain, which hardly saw a single decade of continuous peace between 1794 and 1918. Or do the Napoleonic Wars and all those colonial wars not count?
Then there is France, - wasn't there a fellow named "Napoleon Bonaparte" who is rumored to have caused some trouble in Europe for twenty years or so? France also fought her own series of colonial wars throughout the 19th century, along with involvment in the War of Italian Unification against Austria Hungary, then war with the German states in 1870
And, leaving aside the carefully crafted cropping of the German timeline to consider only the post-unification period, let's talk about Prussia between 1787 and German unification - theyt fought France and lost, then fought France again. Then, after the fall of Napoleon, Prussia fought Denmark, Austria, France again, with a civil war thrown into the mix for good measure. Then, after unification, there was WW1, another civil war, plus an intervention against the Bolsheviks in Poland and the Baltic countries.
No one is trying to argue that America has been any sort of paragon of pacifism, but let's please dispense with the disingenuous efforts to paint the USA as some unique sort of war-mongering state. It is nothing of the sort. In any case, this really has absolutely nothng to do with the form of national government established by the US Constitution. In fact, one of the basic precepts of the founding fathers was to "avoid foreign entanglements".
B