Also, I think Grandin is spot-on with his diagnosis that the American elites were, seemingly contradictorily, both set free and felt incredibly restrained by what they learned with their imperialist strategy in Latin America.

I think this dynamic is only heightening over time, and is now almost bursting at the seams, with Trump’s longing for the “old imperialism” of vast land grabs and direct imperial rule with troops on the ground and big displays of military might, in contrast to the boring liberal “new imperialism” of impersonal financial domination, boasting of their adherence and adoration of the international rules-based order as they feed yet another hundred thousand orphaned children into a titanic meat grinder in the vain hope of maintaining profit margins.

And as Grandin says, the restraints were as necessary as the raw exploitative might. It is a delicate art to maintain foreign populations with just enough contentment with the state of things that they don’t overthrow their comprador governments and take down precious American property and investments with it, but nonetheless still exploit them enough to maintain your genocidal global empire. The European empires did not learn this lesson of restraint fast enough and lost their empires because of it in a wave of independence movements.

A large number (I’m unsure if it’s a majority) of American capitalists and imperialists seem to long for the days of strong, grand, European empires, and hope that the technological (and policing/surveillance) disparity is now large enough again that even with just outright imperial domination from abroad, the populations just won’t be able to mount a concerted resistance. I think this is a miscalculation, especially as AI appears to be pretty clearly flopping and American military industry has some serious output problems, though hundreds of millions will still suffer regardless.