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Historian Arnold Toynbee likened America to a ''large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over something.'' More recent chroniclers have not been as charitable. They ascribe to the United States less innocence, and credit it with a more predatory outlook in its pursuit of global domination and maintaining that primacy. In either case, the suggestion that US actions have been damaging to the world either from guileless clumsiness or from wilful depredation finds greater acceptance today than America's own conviction that it has been a force for good.