I'm getting really fed up with all the smug, knee-jerk anti-Americanism around here and all the paranoid conspiracy theories about American behaviour around the world. It's not that complicated, you can find clear expressions of American interests, policies, motives, and attitudes, in public documents that explain everything you could want to know. You don't need to look for deep dark conspiracies, they're not necessary to explaining anything. You just need to know something about the history of how global powers behave. America's behaving no differently than Britain did when it had that role, or how other European powers like France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, behaved when they wanted that role but were playing second fiddle to the Brits. It's all perfectly predicable.