the European nations wanted to recover and work with the united states....we did not do nation building we helped those nations recover from war. those other nations Yugoslavia Serbia and Libya had no national identity and was little more then grouping of war lords. I am all for helping but the united States just cant force a group to come together they must decide on there own to do the work needed for having a nation state.
That's "nation building" — and it came despite some native factions who didn't want or understand the new structure.
Iraq and Afghanistan, despite their tribal factions (which could have been accommodated, even if eventually requiring separation or breakup into few autonomous or semi-autonomous regions, essentially undoing British screw-ups that arbitrarily joined them decades ago) were on the way to being functional, stable sovereign states, with bases and beachheads for US troops, which would hold in check mostly defeated al-Qaeda, as well as Iran (in the middle between Iraq and Afghanistan) and stabilizing much of the Middle East and East Africa.
Nation building in Germany was different from nation building in Japan, just as it was different from nation building in either Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's very different from "help" (which is usually in the form of "send us money and butt out of our internal affairs") which rarely works unless there is already a democratic regime, in which case "nation building" is not [usually] required anyway.