To cut to the chase, it is Bacevich’s thesis that the American empire was no accident; that it was the product of a concerted effort arising from a vision that goes back to the so-called Founding Fathers. In resurrecting the works of two revisionist American historians, Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams, Bacevich acknowledges that much of what has been written about the Cold War has missed the essential truth that America was on the course of empire as a result of concerted and conscious policy decisions, using every excuse it could get its hands on, including two world wars, to expand its global reach. Using preemptive strikes under false pretenses when necessary, as with Spain, to annex the Spanish empire, to delaying entry into global conflicts long enough so potential competitors would be weakened, and then coming to the rescue to clean up the mess and collect the spoils as the unchallenged leader of the world, American became what it always longed to be, the new Rome. Oh, please! I suppose this is all a deep sinister plot sponsored by the American wing of the Bavarian Illuminati,as formed by Ben Franklin. The two hstorians referred to above are very much of that mindset, their conclusions require you to beleive in a 200+ year plot to rule the world, handed down successfully through the ages independent of any political movement or historical incident that may have occurred in the meantime (or those incidents were all secretly mastermined by the evil cabal). Sort of like an all-American version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and just as credible.
This is drivel. If America wanted to rule the world. It could have done so in 1945. When no one else had the bomb.