But the US and Australia never advance their interests, never sully their hands with blood soaked dictators, never used covert ops.Do I sense a bit of sarcasm in your statement?...Obviously you have forgotten that our country was "ATTACKED" on 09/11/01, which gives us the RIGHT, to act unilaterally if need be, to protect our freedom and way of life.
UN is a paper tiger with no claws, wich was proven lately to be an impotent world body (League of Nations comes to mind), by the likes of France, wich again is busy to cover up their shady deals with Iraq, even thou they were fully aware of their breach of the so called UN arms resolution, right after the '90 war.
I am not saying that US of A is an angel in it's international dealings and/or agreements, we might be somewhat arrogant and pushy at times in our behaviour, even show as a bully, but...at the end of the day we pretty much are on the right side of the issue more or less and get things done.
Since I do believe you think we are a world hegemony and try to tell anybody how to live and what to do, can you tell me how many colonies US of A has (speaking of bullies ) versus the French,Spanish,Portugiese,English,German?
We were attacked on 9/11 by international Islamic terrorists- not Iraq. The Death of three thousand American citizens at the hands of extremists does not give us the right to attack any nation in the world pre-emptively (though we can.) And This nation did have colonies- not to the extent of the Old Europe powers but we had our concessions in China, We took over Spanish possessions and ruled them (even fought a rather nasty war in the Phillipines to protect our rule their). And one can't count the times the marines have landed in various caribbean and Central America nations to protect our interests. Old style colonial rule is not viable. New style colonial rule America is the master of- set up local elites to rule by proxy in our name even though they are formerely independent nations. Not as effective as outright colonial rule but effective enough (and about the only thing we can get away with since the American population would never suffer an outright empire.)