The real reason the US never became ( and will never become ) an expansionist empire

The US today is the most powerful nation in the world. It is the largest economy, leads in technology, and has its currency act as the backbone of global trade. All empires preceding the US in history tended to be far more expansionist in nature, yet the US has made no serious attempts to expand in the last 75 years. For an empire as strong as the US, this is a perplexing scenario. Yet, when we look at the historical context within which the US never expanded any further, it all makes sense. Let us look at that historical context today and how it has led to the contemporary state of the world today.

The end of WW2 and the collapse of colonialist empires:

After the end of WW2 the European nation states were in tatters, most of their industries had been destroyed and they were no longer in a position to maintain any claims on territory outside of their direct borders. This led to the age of decolonization and the modern world map that we see today. Before WW2 the whole world was still based upon a system of expansionist empires trying to gain resources by gaining control of and exploiting other territories. For the second time this approach to running things led to a great war spanning multiple continents. For the US it was a simple lesson to be found here that their approach to running the world had to be different, if they wished to do so for the long term.

The fall of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union had become the largest empire in the world by land area. A populace so large and covering so much of the world that it was easy to believe that nobody would be able to ever defeat the Soviet Union during its heydays. By 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed and it was visible for all to see that being the largest nation in the world had nothing to do with guaranteed success unless control could be maintained and all the territories could be reasonably integrated with the same sense of identification with the union/ nation. The Soviet Union had in the end failed to do so, with it falling apart unable to hold itself together in the end. Here the lesson to be found was that once again, being large did not by itself guarantee success.

The formation of the European Union:

The Europeans had come up with an alternative system of governance after the end of WW2. One based on mutual cooperation and a higher level entity to allow for governing a common policy for the nation states in the alliance. Thus the base for the European Union was formed. This entity continued to grow into the official European Union and continued to grow and maintain stability at a level that the preceding expansionist systems had failed to do. They even came up with a new form of expansionism where another country could choose to join them willingly rather than the EU going out of its way to conquer another territory. Again, the same lesson was playing out, that war had now become too devastating for it to be one of the serious options on the table other than for self defense.

The stability of the US:

The US with its current borders was one of the most stable locations on the planet. It was just big enough to provide its people with all the resources they could ever want from the land around them, it was big enough to support the largest economy in the world, and it had its own sense of identity that completely separated an American from his/her neighbors from other lands. Mexico to the South and Canada to the North gave it a very stable middle spot where any expansionist war would actually lead to more instability than just staying put and continuing to economically integrate further with Mexico and Canada over time. The US was at the exact size and position needed to be to succeed.

Keeping peace guaranteed that the global ruling mandate remained with the US:

This is the most important factor as to why the US is allowed to be the world police and most other nations are against the US being replaced by another nation. All the other great empires of the past had failed in some way at some point in time. The US due to its young age was the only nation state that had so far taken the responsibility of influencing the world and not failed by having the world fall into conflict all around. The US had helped enforce a rules based world order after WW2 under which decade by decade, global conflict had continued to decrease across the world. While there is no doubt that wars were conducted by the US, and there were nation states that suffered for decades by the actions of the US, yet the US was still leading the world through a time period where global conflict was on a consistent decline. This more peaceful environment in turn led to growth in global trade and for almost every single nation to prosper in the aftermath of rising global trade. If the US were to become an expansionist empire it would easily turn the world against the US and have its control over the world weaken over time.

Anti-war sentiment within the US:

The general populace of the US was and currently remains strongly anti-war. This is primarily due to the heavier value placed on human life both of those who are US citizens and those who are not, when compared with the policies and actions of other nation states. A part of this may likely be that due to being a nation of immigrants, the US has people from pretty much every part of the world, which leads to guaranteed protests within irrespective of where the US invades. The US populace in its current form is so traumatize by even the deaths of a few hundred US soldiers in a conflict that any major war breaking out where the US does not win fast guarantees that the president would lose the presidency. For the US politician, in current year, conducting mass scale war such as an expansionist war is simply not worth it due to the backlash it would get from the American populace. This guarantees that the US can at best invade another nation once every 15-20 years, limiting the scale at which it can commit its military over time.

Conclusion:

The US due to observing historical experiences of other expansionist nation states, having a strong anti-war populace at home, and being better off keeping the peace and being at risk of the whole world turning against a pro-war US, results in the US not being an expansionist empire and not likely to be one anytime soon either. The US gains no benefits from expanding and only downsides. It is far more likely that the entire planet outside of the US forms a single nation called "Not-USisthan" rather than for the US to form into a larger continental empire.

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