What makes you think the US needs or has an empire? Do you believe American companies should be constrained by government from engaging in international trade?
According to us lefties, it traces back to Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, but really took hold in the fashion that's hurting us now in the wake of WWII, when the corporate military/industrial complex needed both a goal and a justification for maintaining in peacetime the full scale war expenditures on gear and weaponry - taxpayer's money to them.
Which empire? The one you won from Spain? https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/spanish-american-war And didn't Teddy Roosevelt spout something about taking Canada from the British? http://www.historynet.com/excerpt-teddy-roosevelt-we-would-take-canada.htm My bold.
Actually the belief in American empire is a long standing right wing ambition. It was most recently revived by The George Junior administration with this notion of American Exceptionalism. "Marilyn B. Young argues that after the end of the Cold War in 1991, neoconservative intellectuals and policymakers embraced the idea of an "American empire," a national mission to establish freedom and democracy in other nations, particularly poor ones. She argues that after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration reoriented foreign policy to an insistence on maintaining the supreme military and economic power of America, an attitude that harmonized with this new vision of American empire. Young says the Iraq War (2003–2011) exemplified American exceptionalism.[51]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
If you are a big commercial power, hegemony comes with it. It can't be avoided. It's a part of the package. The US accounts for slightly less than a quarter of the world's economy. So unless you want to shrink America's economy or shrink the economy of everyone else, that's the only wan you will diminish American hegemony. So is that your argument? Do you want to shrink the American economy?
