Never again would it be able to return to anything like the remote and decentralized bucolic agrarian empire it once was; never again would isolation from the world be possible, let alone desirable. Nor could it ever again look to Europe in the way that a child looks to its parent. All that was changed. The mantle of world leadership had passed to it now, indeed had been thrust upon it, in a way it could no longer refuse. That mantle came to the United States not only because of its preeminent military and economic power but because of the generous way it had employed that power in the world’s
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