I think that's a bit ahistorical. I doubt the framers of the Constitution -- who were living in a failed state under the Articles of Confederation -- were thinking about challenging, say, a Spanish Empire that had ruled most of the Americas for the past ~300 years. They were far more concerned with balancing power among themselves and figuring out how to pay Revolutionary War debts. The early U.S. was not stable enough to do imperialism beyond its immediate western border, and displacing European colonizers isn't even imperialism so much as starting a full-scale war with a highly-organized, heavily-armed enemy. It wasn't really until the mid-19th century (after the Bolivarian wave of revolutions turned much of Latin America into even newer, even weaker states) that the U.S. really started looking outside of continental North America. For the first handful of decades there we were focused on westward expansion and not much else.
yeah but thats the reason it was called that to begin with, to imply a central hegemony over the Americas
I think that's a bit ahistorical. I doubt the framers of the Constitution -- who were living in a failed state under the Articles of Confederation -- were thinking about challenging, say, a Spanish Empire that had ruled most of the Americas for the past ~300 years. They were far more concerned with balancing power among themselves and figuring out how to pay Revolutionary War debts. The early U.S. was not stable enough to do imperialism beyond its immediate western border, and displacing European colonizers isn't even imperialism so much as starting a full-scale war with a highly-organized, heavily-armed enemy. It wasn't really until the mid-19th century (after the Bolivarian wave of revolutions turned much of Latin America into even newer, even weaker states) that the U.S. really started looking outside of continental North America. For the first handful of decades there we were focused on westward expansion and not much else.
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