The US has done plenty of terrible things. It’s impossible to be certain of how much of the relative peace we have today is because of the United States.
Overall I’d say it’s probably done more good than harm.
You have to sort of narrow down 'today', though - in europe, you can argue US influence was a source of peace in the post-war era. In east asia, the post-war era was actually extremely bloody.
I think the one thing east asian states tend to have in spades is pragmatism. The US, on the other hand, is very often engaging in the region for ideological reasons. For that reason, it has tended to engage in bloody, somewhat pointless wars that have often span out into civil wars in neighboring states (Cambodia, for example) or produced traumatized, basketcase states (North Korea, for example, or pre-revolution South Korea).
No. The threat of war looming over 40 something countries for 60 years has kept them from going to war with each other, at the cost of having to go to war in a handful of countries for some years.
The country-years of war in the region between 1950 and 2010 could potentially have been in the order of 1000s, but has been in the low 100s.
I'm not saying US threat of war did actually prevent a lot of smaller wars in the region to occur.
I'm also not saying if it did, that it was a good thing. (Maybe like with forest fires, many small wars are better than a few big ones.)
But that's the argument used by people favouring this US threat of war.
> The threat of war looming over 40 something countries for 60 years has kept them from going to war with each other
It's more the promise of security. War comes from insecurity (or for a few among non-democratic countries, the desire to take something from someone). The US security guarantee for Japan, S Korea, etc. meant that they could act with security.
I think the one thing east asian states tend to have in spades is pragmatism. The US, on the other hand, is very often engaging in the region for ideological reasons. For that reason, it has tended to engage in bloody, somewhat pointless wars that have often span out into civil wars in neighboring states (Cambodia, for example) or produced traumatized, basketcase states (North Korea, for example, or pre-revolution South Korea).