Values or muscle, what made the US great?

Professor Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard writes that every year a video of John Kennedy's inaugural address is played during the commencement ceremony at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In his speech Kennedy said,"To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -- not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right." Kennedy was president only for a short period, a little less than 3 years, less than one full term in office, so we will never know what he would have done had he served for 2 full terms. But in that short period he organised the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to try to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba, allowed the assassination of Rafael Trujillo of Dominican Republic and set the stage for the Vietnam War, which was to kill over 3 million people. For us in India, the most dangerous part of Kennedy's speech was,"And so my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." This philosophy has been most enthusiastically adopted by our politicians, who constantly demand sacrifices from the people, as in suddenly withdrawing high denomination notes from circulation, so as to win coming elections in UP and Punjab. So, one politician has been in a private hospital for around 2 months, most of the time in ICU, while another will get a kidney transplant from an unrelated donor, while we get nothing for the taxes we pay. "The basis of America's greatness and ability to lead the world stems from universal values that underpin a set of rules that uphold the others' rights, not an America that tries to base its greatness on a set of deals aimed at getting the better of others," writes Prof Hausmann. We disagree. America's greatness comes from wealth and its armed forces. Wealth came from grabbing land from the Indians who had lived there for over 10,000 years, the use of slave labor and later from unequal trade deals with emerging economies. Its supremacy is guaranteed by its superiority in weapons, as shown by the hydrogen bomb on Nagasaki, napalm and dioxin over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and depleted uranium and white phosphorus on Afghanistan and Iraq. Now weaker nations are not succumbing to US pressure. The Doha round of talks at the WTO has died. Recently African nations walked out of talks on digital trade rules. Instead imports from abroad have killed jobs in manufacturing, which is why Donald Trump was elected to be president. The reason of America's greatness is summed up by former Foreign Minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer who writes that Donald Trump's victory is "Goodbye to the West" whose power was derived from Nato. Facts versus rhetoric.