US Hegemony and the Continuity of Imperial Foreign Policy
To state that there are no fundamental differences between international politics in 1900-45 and afterwards would be to carry the argument to an extreme, even though the continuities are greater than the discontinuities. Above all else, the liberal, democratic states and empires in the U.S. and Western Europe were highly interventionist and aggressive in the developing world and Global South long before World War II, and this did not change in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Even governments that were democratically elected were sometimes overthrown and replaced by more pliable regimes, such as the ‘friendly' dictators of Central America and the Caribbean. At the same time, though, there has also been far more harmony and cooperation between the Great Powers since 1945 than in the previous fifty years, especially through NATO and the European Union. America's alliance with Japan, Britain, France and Germany has survived various stresses and strains over the decades, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this requires an explanation. None of the imperial powers has fought a major war since the invention of nuclear weapons, even though they have intervened frequently against the non-nuclear states of the developing world. Perhaps this alliance is explained by political and ideological affinities, as liberals maintain, or by cultural affinities as opposed to Muslim and Orthodox civilizations, as Samuel Huntington explains—although admittedly Japan is left as quite an outlier here.