| > Were there no highly educated and intelligent people in Europe for 2 centuries? Their mistake was generally adding Rousseau and Marx into the mix, rather than stopping with Locke. > As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US. Err... before Canada became quasi-independent, the United States had a very long border with the British Empire, which was (in)famous for its penchant for grabbing territory. They even burned Washington DC at one point. The story was the same with Mexico. In the early years of the United States, Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, another entity noted for wars of conquest on the grand scale. And yes, after Mexican independence, the United States launched a war of conquest of its own across that border. But it could have gone the other way in the early days. The French (another colonial power) also had massive holdings in North America. Sorry, the "United States didn't have any war-like neighbors" theory doesn't hold. |