Maybe they've always been Mordor

Of course, only the Americans matter, right? Let's focus on those poor soldiers who went off to another continent to massacre villagers and sometimes got shot, and completely ignore the million villagers who were massacred and had napalm and agent orange dropped on them.

But it's fine! The Nazis killed more civilians, so, you know, from then on literally nothing less than the Holocaust ever matters, right?

That's the real meaning of "Pax Americana" right there. The US will come to your country and slaughter people en masse and leave it in rubble using chemical weapons that last for generations, and then they won't even recognize it as a significant conflict because it was primarily your people who died, and only Americans register as human to them. Perhaps later they'll come by to film a movie about how killing you made them feel sad.