by Angus Macdonald

Created on: August 06, 2007

To assume that America needs to police the world both politically as well as physically is extremely wrong. The whole concept of democracy is that everyone has equal say, and this should be true of world politics. Every country should have equal opportunity to engage with the rest of the world. For years the US has taken it upon itself to engage in hostile actions against countries which it deems to be acting against the global political structure. However, these actions can also be seen to be America enforcing it's position as an economic imperialist state, a country which dominates world trade and controls markets.

The beginnings of the US attempts to control world politics and economics can be traced back to the post World War II era and specifically to the Marshall Plan. This plan was America's way of offering aid to the destroyed economies of Europe after the devastation of the war. The plan was to offer huge amounts of aid to the countries of western Europe so they could rebuild their economies as quickly as possible, countries of eastern Europe did not sign up as they saw it as an attempt to seize control of European economies. The plan greatly benefited the US as the countries involved used the aid to trade huge amounts with the US, with the other general aim of stopping the spread of communism throughout Europe by implementing the concept of a free market throughout Europe. Thus capitalism took hold in western Europe, with America reaping most of the economic benefits, and eastern Europe became cut off essentially starting the Cold War.

Since that time there have been a number of incidents of America doing what it sees as the right thing, which generally involves destroying communist or socialist states to allow the spread of capitalism throughout the world. There are many ways in which the US has achieved this goal : supporting imperialist revolutions; imposing strict economic sanctions against communist states; hostile action; etc. There has always been one main goal however, and that is to put the American economy in as good a position globally as possible. As a result of such actions by the US, millions of people have been killed or died through starvation. All this to ensure that wealthy American businessmen can earl even more money.

Aside from the American attempts to control as much world trade as possible, there is one other factor which makes American dominance over world politics extremely dangerous. This is the fact that America has a massive

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