re: Are Americans historically less able to empathize with other cultures in

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Isn't it somewhat naive of us to believe we can change cultures that are far older than our own? How did other successful conquering nations deal with this? I also apologize for all of the typos. I am writing this on my phone.

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I would argue the opposite, actually. We are often too empathetic.

First, the Romans and even the British were much more brutal than we are as an empire. They were ruthless when they had to be. The British put down rebellion after rebellion in places like the Sudan, South Africa, India (multiple times), Malaysia, the Zulu Kingdom, Ireland, China, on and on, often very brutally. They were extraordinarily imperial in exporting their culture and their ways. To this day most of the former British empire uses British parliamentary democracy, education methods, hospital systems, infrastructure (driving on the right side of the road, for instance); Anglos were essentially a separate (and superior) class in every single one of these dominions. They had no problem crushing local customs that they believed were anti-British (slavery being a prominent one, especially in their African dominions).

The Romans were even worse; virtually everything they conquered was forcefully modeled after the rest of the empire.

We are lightweights when it comes to this stuff, but then again, we don't have much experience with true imperialism, as we've only done it on a large scale globally for about one hundred years or so. Some might argue that we did it when conquering native tribes (and they might be right), but bum-running a bunch of sparsely-populated and disparate groups doesn't come close to what the British and Romans did.