Jack of Harts

The United States of America was born out of a strong wish to just not be involved in the Old World’s politics and squabbles. One of our earliest international policies, the Monroe Doctrine, even enshrined this idea in cold hard text. You stay out of the Americas, and we’ll stay out of your business. We maintained that aggressively non-interventionist stance for the better part of two hundred years. I say aggressively because when Muslim pirates kidnapped our people, we built the biggest and baddest ships on the planet, put the most bloody minded Marines we could find on them, and went out to aggressively teach them why it was a really bad idea to get our attention. That’s how the Marines added “To the shores of Tripoli” to their anthem.

After World War II shattered every economy on the planet, sunk a third of the ships on the seas, killed an entire generation of Europeans, and shattered world order as we knew it, we grudgingly accepted the position of the world’s cop to keep another Hitler from rising and starting World War III. Americans were grudging about it. Politicians were a bit more fond of the idea. But we were the only surviving technological society so we helped everybody else rebuild. We’ve spent the last eighty years rebuilding, patrolling the oceans, and helping everybody in the world become functional modern societies.

We helped build a good world on the surface, but there were a lot of cracks if you knew where to look. Unfortunately, most of our people didn’t look. We are still fundamentally isolationist in our viewpoints, and most Americans simply don’t see beyond our borders. We have enough space here. What do we need with more? But there are always people who want more, and that is why we are where we are right now.