> No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by randon luck
Yes, to the extent that the US had more peace and prosperity than, say, European states, most intelligent people with even modest knowledge attribute that not to random chance but to three major factors:
(1) The Pacific Ocean,
(2) The Atlantic Ocean,
(3) The extremely small number of remotely near-peer powers that have ever existed not separated from the US by (1) or (2).
You're right that the geography of the US confers such an advantage that it seems as though it could have had literally any form of government since its founding and still come out ahead in the end, but I'm not sure if that's actually true. There are plenty of historical examples of resource-rich (in all senses of the word "resource") nations that have failed to prosper and resource-poor nations that thrived despite their challenges. A key difference between those nations is culture and governance.
> Which of course explains why the rest of the Americas have also been so peaceful and prosperous.
The rest of the Americas benefit from (1) and (2), but most other countries have done less well with (3), in large part due to the US, which has had its “peaceful” hands in much of the conflict in the hemisphere.
The point was governmental stability, not protection against invasion. If you look at, say, France, in the same time they've had their revolution, then Napoleon, then back to monarchy, then back and forth with republics and emperors and such. They're now on the fifth version of their republic.
In the same time, the US has had the Civil War, and January 6. That's "relative peace and prosperity".
the US has been at war in some shape for form for 90% of its history, hard to call that "peaceful". a good chunk of American prosperity you can chalk up to the random luck of geography; abundant natural resources, two oceans separating from rest of the world, lack of many close neighbors, etc.
I don't reject it based on age. I reject it based on the fact that the people in question were largely slaveowners who led a revolution because the government of Britain was trying to muscle in on their tea smuggling operations, who thought that phlogiston existed, who were deists, who have nothing to teach us today.
In the same vein as GP, the validity of an idea is independent of whether the people who held them owned slaves. If you don't own slaves but think the sun rises from the west, you're still wrong.
Besides, if the only things to be learned from history are those from whom you deem morally clean, I'd wager there's precious little left at all.
