the US was dominant in Cuba, Vietnam and the Philippines too -- for a while. the people in Cuba were so happy with US dominance that they staged a successful revolution. and US dominance ended up killing, directly or indirectly, a couple million people in Vietnam and Cambodia. even today chemicals left behind by US forces on military bases result in thousands of Vietnamese cancer deaths annually. and the Philippines loved our dominance so much that they decided in 1992 not to renew US naval base leases worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
as for South Korea, Japan and Germany, how much credit can the US really take for their success today? we did not quite wage a war of 100% total annihilation in the 1940s, but US-led allied forces did bomb Japan and Germany pretty heavily in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. Japan didn't exactly love being a US occupied territory. that lasted less than ten years.
the people in Japan, Germany and South Korea worked their asses off to get the prosperity they have today. but, ok, sure, the US can take credit for the Marshall plan, and for opening domestic markets to exports from Japan and Germany, and for not stealing West German infrastructure and sending it back to the US (as the Soviets did to East Germany).
as for South Korea, Japan and Germany, how much credit can the US really take for their success today? we did not quite wage a war of 100% total annihilation in the 1940s, but US-led allied forces did bomb Japan and Germany pretty heavily in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. Japan didn't exactly love being a US occupied territory. that lasted less than ten years.
the people in Japan, Germany and South Korea worked their asses off to get the prosperity they have today. but, ok, sure, the US can take credit for the Marshall plan, and for opening domestic markets to exports from Japan and Germany, and for not stealing West German infrastructure and sending it back to the US (as the Soviets did to East Germany).