150 years ago today the US was about to have a disputed election and ensuing constitutional crisis. It was fighting - or pretending to fight - against an active insurgency in the south, it was losing, and it was about to pull its troops out entirely. The result would be eighty years of Jim Crow and single-party rule. So the domestic record varies, to say the least. But even if it weren't: the rest of the world is not domestic, and doesn't want to be. For them the relevant precedent is not how America has treated Americans, it is how America has treated foreigners, and there we are profoundly unreliable. Sometimes we give you money, and sometimes we give you guns, and sometimes we kill you and your family and replace you with the new guy, and then later we kill the new guy too. Sometimes we help save you from fascism, and sometimes we occupy you for generations and put people who object in concentration camps. America treats its buffer states relatively well, by the standards of past empires. It treats its backyard very poorly. And of course it treated its "domestic dependent nations" to a long campaign of genocide. The Europeans have every right to fear moving from the one zone to the other.