For the last twenty years in the Middle East alone, the number of civilian deaths in which the US is either directly or indirectly involved is easily in the millions
People who create studies suggesting those wars killed 5 million people include a lot of ludicrous definitions of "killed" to get numbers that big.
It's not like iraq had tanks by the USA border, ready to roll in no?
It also didn't have any of the terrible weapons that USA claimed they had.
In all cases, the US has demonstrated a level of weakness on the foreign stage, and terrible people have come to exploit that. Like it or not, those little wars in Iraq were the long arm of the Pax Americana, which is ending now, to the tune of the first land war in Europe in quite some time. And one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
This is what happens when you are a world-spanning empire. An empire, by the way, that Europe, India, China, and the rest of the civilized world has benefitted massively from in the form of free security and safe transport of goods. When there is no dominant empire, the world gets messy.
I could point you to literally dozens of books on the Pax Americana and its decline (google is your friend) and America's de facto empire, as well as historical studies of the Pax Brittanica and the Pax Romana. Or Chinese histories that discuss the waves of peace and prosperity following the growth of major dynasties which end exactly the same way. I suspect you won't read any of them though, since nobody who asks for a source in an online discussion really wants a source (nobody ever asks for a source when they agree with you). They just want to claim that their counterpart is uninformed.
You want to engage in a debate involving cited sources? What's good for the goose is good for the gander - write a response with a citation or two that rebuts a key point. Otherwise, asking for sources in online arguments is borderline trolling.
In the case of Pax Americana the framing is also dubious as it wasn't American dominance that kept the peace in Europe (on this side of the iron curtain) but arguably more the shared market and the necessity of cooperation to recover from the wounds of two world wars while facing the threat of annihilation in the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.
Even in Europe this period was heavily defined by oppressive policing in both East and West Germany (culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in the East and the student protests and RAF terrorist attacks in the West), civil war in Northern Ireland (with terrorist attacks reaching deep into England at times), separatist movements in the Basque region, the excruciatingly slow death of fascism in Spain and Portugal, the violent suppression of striking miners in the UK, and the birth pains of neoliberalism and austerity.
The "pax" in these titles always only applies in a very narrow sense to the affluent in its imperial core, i.e. the American upper middle class of the 1950s or the British bourgeoisie of the colonial era. Even the Pax Romana is not a coherent description of life in the Roman Empire for the time frame it is often applied to and was defined by expansion (i.e. military conquest) not an absence of war.
If anything, the "prosperity" these terms often imply always only existed because of a hierarchical system of exploitation and the "peace" refers to the absence of serious challengers to disrupt this exploitation. The prosperity in Britain during the Pax Britannica specifically only existed due to the violent oppression of British colonies and the absence of powerful challengers to claim those colonies instead. Following the war economies of WW2, the 20th century saw a massive redistribution of wealth and public infrastructure to the financial elites, especially under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, while colonialism largely evolved from the crude brutal oppression of e.g. the British Raj to loans and privatization, aka "soft power" (promoting the production of worthless cash crops for international trade at low margins instead of vital food crops, making the economy dependent on imports to keep the local population fed, or exporting raw resources rather than building up local infrastructure to refine those resources into goods that can be sold at a higher price and thus having to import the finished goods at exorbitant prices).
So, yes, for you or I living in the imperial core - whether literally in the US or by extension in Europe - the "decline" and the rise of challengers is worrisome and can only be negative. But ultimately, especially to those living outside that core, the challengers are no worse or better than the status quo.
Much of Europe's economic policy benefits from the huge subisdy that the US covers them with its guns - a drain of 6-10% of GDP may otherwise apply to NATO countries that find themselves up against Putin (and in a hypothetical world - maybe against each other). The Marshall Plan is also a relatively visible indication of how intertwined Europe's post-WWII growth was done with America's involvement, and when you look at US foreign aid ("imperial economic stimulus"), a lot of it today goes to poorer European nations. I agree with you that the EU (post-iron-curtain project) has been, as you suggest, a solely European initiative driven more by European solidarity than US guns. However, it exists in the world of the petrodollar (not any more) and with the quiet reassurance that many of the leading nations in the EU are NATO members. As we have seen with Ukraine, sometimes that NATO membership matters.
Empires are always a lot looser than we think - the Roman empire was a great example of this, where the nation-state of Rome (in the modern idea) didn't extend beyond the Alps until the Caracalla years, where Roman citizenship was truly extended to the provinces (note: after the end of the pax Romana). Egypt and the levant were basically completely autonomous, much like the EU is today.
This happened in europe, south america, and middle east.
> I suspect you won't read any of them though
That's very unacademic of you to suspect I won't read "the books", which you didn't even bother to list.
I have read this book in the summer. Perhaps you want to give it a read and step out of your bubble? https://www.amazon.it/del-marcio-Occidente-Piergiorgio-Odifr...
> Pax Brittanica
That's now how you spell it.
But also, on an online forum, a post is written once, but read many times. When you say "look it up yourself", that doesn't tell one person to look it up, it tells 10 or 100. That's inefficient - the looking up is done multiple times rather than once.
And, I can google for why the earth is flat and find plenty of resources. The fact that I can find stuff on google that supports your position doesn't say much.
So, yeah. Maybe you could supply some resources that you think are solid, and why you think they are?
Wait is that a good thing or a bad thing?
The US goes out of its way to minimize collateral damage because it gets accused of causing all collateral damage in the first place.