First Step...

One of the most popular critiques hurled against the US is that the country is an Empire or Imperial in nature.  This argument is then used as the base fact to support a wide range of other complaints against the US. If the truth is to be attained we will first need to expose this nonsense before continuing on to addressing other concerns and complaints. However, by definition and characteristics the US is not and has never been an Empire.

Many people assume that America is already an empire by being the world's only superpower, by virtue of its military supremacy, economic power, global influence, technological prowess, and world-wide alliances. The US can reasonably described as a hegemony but that status was only achieved over a long time period with the cooperation of a whole lot of other countries and a lot of luck. It was mainly then world spanning wars of the 40's and 50's that enabled the US to rise above others in the global hierarchy. 

The US political system is volatile. The presidential term limits alone create turnover after only 4 or 8 years and that is not enough time to apply an integrated and dominate foreign policy consistency. Every turnover of power presents a situation where those now in charge do not support all of the previous administrations policies. Even small changes can derail the countries foreign policy focus.

The Empire or Imperial descriptions are not correct. The US is often attacked because of it's military actions. The US is accused of warring for oil resources and in one sense they are. It is critical to the US as well as a whole lot of other countries that the oil continue to be distributed fairly across the globe. The US could have seized the oil resources in either Iraq or Kuwait by virtue of it's military strength but did not. Oil is sold at a market price that the producer countries can effect to their benefit thus allowing them to create great wealth for both the producer country and it's peoples but a lot of these governments never let any of that wealth to help it's impoverished people. These countries could be some of the most successful on the planet but the are not due to the type of rulers in that part of the world.

There have also been complaints about Western corporations stealing the oil. Most of the oil producing countries would still be barren if not foe these western countries who built the infrastructure needed to extract the oil in the first place. However, once everything was set up and running smoothly these countries "nationalized" all corporate assets with little or no compensation to those who lost their assets. If the oil producing countries are not careful they could find someone else willing to "Globalize" out the oil infrastructure from beneath them if the oil supply becomes unreliable due the the incompetence of the governments involved.