# Thoughts on Hegemony I grew up idealizing the United States. In it I saw a paragon of righteousness, its promotion of liberalism, humanism and capitalism as the ultimate political good, fallible only when it shows too much restraint in promotion of those ideals. Even as the U.S. bombed my home country of Serbia in 1999 (I was there), I was strong in my belief that the U.S. was in the right, and that it was the fault of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic which had to go (see also [[Two Distinct Democracies]]). That bombing campaign left the Serbian economy in shambles, a lot of Serbian people hungry, and a lot even slowly dying due to the prolific use of depleted uranium munitions. I was particularly naïve (and young at the time), and so it took a long time for my cynicism to catch up so that I can see all the evidence of hegemony and imperialism. Perhaps the last nail in that coffin was watching Oliver Stone’s amazing documentary series “The Untold History of the United States,” which is basically a catalogue of all of its despicable foreign policy decisions. I’m sure it even dissuaded some of its staunchest patriots. After the [[Russian Invasion of Ukraine]] I ask myself if I was being too harsh on the U.S. after all? **On the international stage where countries act based on self-interest alone without any universal humanist morals, am I right to apply my own set of standards to a superpower, or should it instead be judged comparatively, based on the actions of another? And if it should be judged comparatively, how do we avoid degrading to the least common denominator?**