Its certainly a matter of perspective. Some 3rd world countries see us as "imperialist Americans " after all of their natural resources...despite the fact that we have never attempted to colonize the world like England, Spain, France, etc... the territories we have, like Puerto Rico, etc would love to become states...so they could suckle at the teat of welfare even more. I am not blind though, we certainly have noticed that Afghanistan has some of the largest if not THE largest deposits of rare earth minerals needed in nano tech etc...or that since our fiat economy is tied to petro dollars, we will always maintain some control over the sandbox and anywhere else oil reserves can be accessed or controlled by us...our hands are not squeaky clean, you have maybe seen my posts about us hanging the Kurds out to dry....again...as they are slaughtered. We make mistakes, and get involved in crap that we shouldn't...but we do at least try to spread capitolism and democracy where we can, which lifts countries out of poverty...as well as hand put billions and billions of dollars in aid every single year that could be used to probably provide food and shelter to every single homeless person in America several times over (which they wouldnt have worked for, so they would destroy and squander, of course) as a country i still believe that in general we try to help and change for the better other nations as much as we can. I highly doubt that China or the Russians give away half of what we do every year. I personally wish we would stay out pf other countries civil wars unless there are serious human rights abuses, and not give huge sums of cash to any country unless they could prove it was being used directly to dig wells, grow crops, build cheap housing for the poor, etc....i dont support us paying for dictators to buy thousands of ak47s and russian tanks so they can squash rebellion by their own people (this happens all the time i think)