Are you a domestic terrorist?

[Jester]

I wouldn't quite call the US a world power at that time projecting power across the continent.

How do you think you went from thirteen colonies on the coast to a sea-to-sea country five times that size? The US may not have started as a world power, but it sure became one right quick. You fought practically everyone on the continent, and took territory from pretty much all of them. You want a war about 200 years ago? Don't like 1812? Try the Seminole war. In the case of Mexico in 1848, you took half their country- and nearly half of yours. If the US in 1800 didn't look so powerful, by 1860, it was powerful enough to make not just one but two of the largest, deadliest armies ever fielded. That was 150 years ago. This stuff didn't happen accidentally, and it sure wasn't small potatoes.

The US army military across the whole of the US at the start of the war was at most 7,000 inexperienced, poorly outfitted, and poorly led men. Had Britain actually tried, they would have walked over the US in a heart beat.

I seem to recall them having tried to walk all over the US (or, rather, what would become the US) about forty years prior. It didn't go so well, if I recall correctly.

I'm not saying that the US was isolated before WWII, and not engaged in skirmishes around the globe. They were, but mostly things that required a squad of marines to scare away pirates or escort some stranded US citizen to safety. Even for WWI, we sent over a token force of ill trained men who ran in unprepared and were slaughtered.

*You conquered the Philippines*. That's an island group inhabited by millions of people halfway around the world. You weren't fighting "pirates". There were no "stranded US citizens." It wasn't a "skirmish", it was a long, bloody war of imperial conquest. You sent Jack Pershing over there, the only man ever to outrank George Washington. How is this not registering as a major colonial war?

-Jester