Yeah, if anything, 1945-2025 may end being a historical anomaly. The US was an aggressively expensive colonial settler state though most of its history. We’re still settler colonial, but we’ve at least not been aggressively expansionist for nearly a century.
Over 300 years of aggressive expansion (if you include the colonial period.) A return to orthodoxy after an 80 year hiatus doesn’t seem so unusual in that regard. Really, everyone who remembered why we stopped acting that way has now died of old age, so we now have only our shared national mythos to guide us. And our culture has continued to celebrate its expansionist past, even if we’ve walked away from it as policy over the last few generations.
Yeah, if anything, 1945-2025 may end being a historical anomaly. The US was an aggressively expensive colonial settler state though most of its history. We’re still settler colonial, but we’ve at least not been aggressively expansionist for nearly a century.
Over 300 years of aggressive expansion (if you include the colonial period.) A return to orthodoxy after an 80 year hiatus doesn’t seem so unusual in that regard. Really, everyone who remembered why we stopped acting that way has now died of old age, so we now have only our shared national mythos to guide us. And our culture has continued to celebrate its expansionist past, even if we’ve walked away from it as policy over the last few generations.