The United States emerged as a major world power and as an imperialist nation in 1899 when the U.S. went to war with Cuba's colonial overlord, Spain under the pretext of responding to a bombing on the USS Maine anchored in Havana, Cuba. After routing Europe's weakest colonial power, the U.S. made off with all of Spain's colonial possessions in Latin America and Asia and seized control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. A century later, the U.S. stands alone as the world's superpower. It is the only country with the ability to go to war anywhere in the world now in 2003. As a super power, the U.S. is exercising its imperialist stance all over the world. Just as the U.S. went to war with Cuba for suspicious reasons about 100 years ago, they also went to war with Iraq, a century later for dubious causes. But this American imperialism, such as Iraq war is a bad foreign policy for Americans and the world peace because it disrupts the U.S. economy and it deteriorates the world relations. I will draw a statistics on the cost of Iraq War, which is an indirect consequence of US imperialism and also argue that anti-US sentiment is coming out of Europe. .
The main reason American imperialism is bad for Americans is that US government is spending lot of money in the war or reconstruction of the country they pulverize in the war. The very recent example of American imperialism and a strong example of spending in war is Iraq war. The U.S. spends millions of dollars in Iraq every day. I would recommend the readers to visit the website www.costof war.com which shows the dollars spent each second of occupation of the U.S. military, including the total cost of war. Pentagon estimates that the cost of war in Iraq is $48 billion (Pentagon estimation). And the U.S. provides almost each dollar of this gigantic amount. No countries other than Britain are giving support in terms of men, materials and money.
