Is it fair to blame the United States alone for making the modern world worse?
Short answerNo. Present conditions emerge from decisions made by many societies and generations, even though some people and states bear greater shares of responsibility than others.
NotesOne country cannot carry sole responsibility for the condition of the modern world. Human societies and successive generations have produced the present through many connected decisions. That does not make responsibility equal, because particular people and states can bear larger shares for particular outcomes. It does mean that a historian should resist turning a complex causal history into one national villain. The exchange offers a compact methodological lesson about distinguishing unequal responsibility from a monocausal explanation.