[Hack&Lube]

Cold War proxy wars are very different from today's wars.

The bipolar world was very much under the Truman Doctrine and Domino theory of preventing the expansion of the Soviet Union. Much of the political thought of the day was that once countries fell to communism, so would their neighbours and give the Soviet Union even more power and influence and staging grounds for attack on the United States.

As the US could not directly fight the USSR and vice-versa, proxy wars were basically what took place where each assisted but did not directly attack each other in fear of mutually assured destruction. If you want a pretense to enter war, it was to support the democratic south Vietnam from military communist expansion and to prevent the supposed domino effect from occuring.

Yes, I would very much call the Cold War also a war of Imperialism but definetely not in the classical sense. It was a imperialistic war for influence, for ideology, and for the sheer survival of the world given the nuclear arsenals at push-button ready on both sides. I would not call modern day American wars to be classical imperialism either. The arguments that it's war for oil or military contracts at the start of the Iraq war have some credence but I don't think that argument floats anymore given the situation in the middle east and the possibility of the U.S. pulling out. Mostly, they were arrogant and full of hubris. They were trying to stave off what the Bush administration felt to be a source of imminent danger at the source, using what they thought was overwhelmingly superior military power...And they botched it terribly. Just like Vietnam.

They thought it'd be easy, they thought they could flex their muscles and get a quick victory. In one fell stroke they'd get rid of an antagonist of America (Saddam), stave off Terrorism at the source, and gain economic bounty from oil and contracts for rebuilding Iraq. Of course it all blew up in their faces. Absolutely ridiculous when many of the people there (Rumsfeld, Cheney) were involved in Vietnam as well...They were totally blind to the history they lived and thought they wouldn't relive their past mistakes. It was basically the arrogance and greed of far too few people given far too much power (in the aftermath of political suasion post 9/11) in one place.

Vietnam was so much more complicated, don't take what you read on Wikipedia for anything more than 1% of the surface truth. I would totally disagree with your general conclusion that "using the military for the purposes of imperialism and economic colonization is not just a Republican thing, its an American thing". Remember that the Korean war was fought by Harry Truman, a democrat. But then again, the political ideologies of the parties were pretty much in reverse in that era...(ie: Democrats were the southern white powerbase). Basically in fact, it's pretty much just a human thing. American just happens to have the military industrial machine, the odd confluence of power in one concentrated place, along with a substantial backing of their populace to try it every now and then while most other countries do not.

Also remember that the America of the early 1960s had a very different role and reputation on the world stage. America was the shining beacon of the west, the vanguard of the defense of all democratic, liberal, western countries against the forces of communism. It was the power that had just spent trillions rebuilding Europe and Kennedy was celebrated wherever he went in Europe. Perhaps in that era, they did rightfully have the mantle of "Team America: World Police" and people were glad that America was there rather than not. The credibility Kennedy spoke of was the credibility of the U.S. insofar as the confidence those western countries bordering the iron curtain had that America would defend their interests...so that they didn't themselves fall to the wave of communism predicted by domino theory before the era of detente. In that era, with so many countries bordering on revolution, civil war, and hundreds of ex-colonies shaking themselves free of their former European masters, it was very plausible that these states could easily violentely fall to communism.