America emerged from WWII looking virtually untouched and undefeatable. The sense of American superiority was everywhere since, of all the major powers, it alone maintained a vast and intact industrial base. America shone on the post WWII era and was out pacing and out producing the rest of the world because the rest of the world was to busy putting their countries back together and therefore unable to compete against this influence. Of course, with their new found success came both arrogance and envy. It was this combination of U. S. arrogance and the envy of an impossible and unsustainable standard of living that leads us to where we are now; with America being perhaps the most reviled nation on Earth but this did not happen till the mid to late 1960s. The twenty years between 1945 and 1965 will go down as the golden age of America but there sense of superiority and the will to impose their system on others (its that manifest destiny thing again) made as many allies as enemies and many allies into enemies.
But we have completely diverged from the original thread now.
