We had the largest and most powerful navy and air force in the world at the end of World War II. We could have ruled the world if we wanted to. We didn’t want to. So we went back home and helped everybody that got blasted into the stone age rebuild themselves back into the industrial age.

By the time I was growing up in the 1980s, we were the arsenal of Democracy, protecting Europe and Japan and the rest of the world from the evils of Soviet Communism and burning them to the ground by the simple expedient of producing more than they could ever hope to produce. We just built them into ruin and left them shattered on the side of the road that we built at the same time just to show them we could. Because America, F Yeah.

It could have ended right there. Russia asked to join NATO and be friends. We could have just accepted the peace, helped rebuild Russia like we did the others we defeated, and gone forward as friends like we did with the others. Of course they might have been lying. But we never even gave them a chance to lie or cheat or… gasp… actually maybe even play nice with us.

Some enterprising individuals had different ideas, you see. We were the last superpower. We could just tell them what to do. We could surround them. Add every nation that was once in the Soviet Union into NATO and isolate them from everybody. What could they do about it? We were the unipower and no one could stand against us. So why let them try?