when two people are playing a game, and one of them is willing to use violence, it's quite a bit harder for the other person to not use violence as well.
The US uses violence and coercion as a matter of fact, continuously, in every way, shape, and form.
If you tried to 'play' with the US from a position of mutuality and co-creation... you get colonized and cleansed and westernized.
Exactly. If England would have left the colonies alone, not imported enslaved people, not attacked when we declared independence, then they wouldn’t have seen violence from us.
Like the Mexican–American War? OP's explanation of why US is the top-dog can't be whole story, but there's something to it. For example, it's hard to imagine the US would be half as powerful without the territorial gains made as a result of the conflicts surrounding the Mexican–American War (for example, by far the most economically important states are California & Texas!), yet at the same time virtually everyone agrees that the War was completely indefensible (Grant in a diary called it "one of the most unjust [war] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation").
It’s not fair to call that a war of aggression on our part. Mexico claiming to own vast swaths of land including California and Texas in the 1840s was about as legitimate as Spain’s prior claim over the same “New Spain” which Mexico merely inherited… again by violence.
It’d be as if the US claimed to own Antartica, the moon, or mars. Perhaps there may have been a few people there, but it was never a serious enough population that anyone could think their claim of ownership was competitive. I mean, they had a stronger claim than Spain, but that’s not saying much.
