The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men and How to Change the World (2007)

The US has been criticized for supporting dictatorships with economic assistance and military hardware. Particular dictatorships have included Musharraf of Pakistan, the Shah of Iran, Museveni of Uganda, warlords in Somalia, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Park Chung-hee of South Korea, Generalissimo Franco of Spain, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

The US has been criticized by Noam Chomsky for opposing nationalist movements in foreign countries, including social reform.

The United States was criticized for manipulating the internal affairs of foreign nations, including Guatemala,[21] Chile,[21] Cuba,[12] Colombia,[12] various countries in Africa[16] including Uganda.[16] See also Covert United States foreign regime change actions.

The US has been accused of condoning actions by Israel against Palestinians.

Some critics argue that America's policy of advocating democracy may be ineffective and even counterproductive.[23][24] Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that "[t]he coming to power of Hamas is a very good example of excessive pressure for democratization" and argued that George W. Bush's attempts to use democracy as an instrument against terrorism were risky and dangerous.[25][25][25] Analyst Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace agreed that imposing democracy "from scratch" was unwise, and didn't work.[13] Realist critics such as George F. Kennan argued U.S. responsibility is only to protect its own citizens and that Washington should deal with other governments on that basis alone; they criticize president Woodrow Wilson's emphasis on democratization and nation-building although it wasn't mentioned in Wilson's Fourteen Points,[26] and the failure of the League of Nations to enforce international will regarding Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in the 1930s. Realist critics attacked the idealism of Wilson as being ill-suited for weak states created at the Paris Peace Conference. Others, however, criticize the U.S. Senate's decision not to join the League of Nations which was based on isolationist public sentiment as being one cause for the organization's ineffectiveness.

President Bush has been criticized for neglecting democracy and human rights by focusing exclusively on an effort to fight terrorism.[16][16] The US was criticized for alleged prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe, according to Amnesty International.[27] In response, the US government claimed incidents of abuse were isolated incidents which did not reflect U.S. policy.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized excessive U.S. spending on military projects,[28] and suggested a linkage between its foreign policy abroad and racism at home.[28] Even in 1971, a Time Magazine essayist wondered why there were 375 major foreign military bases around the world with 3,000 lesser military facilities and concluded "there is no question that the U.S. today has too many troops scattered about in too many places."[7] In a 2010 defense report, Cordesman criticized out-of-control military spending.[29] Expenditures to fight the War on Terror are vast and seem limitless.[30] The Iraq war was expensive and continues to be a severe drain on U.S. finances.[13][13] Bacevich thinks the U.S. has a tendency to resort to military means to try to solve diplomatic problems.[15] The Vietnam War was a costly, decade-long military engagement which ended in defeat, and the mainstream view today is that the entire war was a mistake.[citation needed] The dollar cost was $111 billion, or $698 billion in 2009 dollars.[31] Similarly, the second Iraq war was viewed by many[who?] as being a mistake, since there were no weapons of mass destruction found, the war ended in December 2011.

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