The US is a ruthless exploiter

It is not surprising how far flexing a little military or economic muscle gets favourable outcomes.

The early days of the US continued the displacement and decimation of indigenous tribes, along with increases in slavery to fuel its economic growth for the rich landed gentry. Even Lincoln was not so worried about the implications of the wording of the constitution regarding the lack of freedom for slaves, except for that the Southern states wanted to secede, and so needed to rally slaves to help the North. Despite the North's win, the power of the Southern landowners remained and kept any further progress towards liberating the ex-slaves delayed until a hundred years after the Civil War.

The end of the 19^th century was to see the start of US serving the interests of its elites in brow-beating other nations into submission. The first target nation of the US was Spain and its near-US colonies, where the US really set up the modus operandi of its template: support dissenting groups in those colonies with arms and promises of eventual independence, only to renege on the promises so they could maintain control without commitment. Their control mechanism is to install a ruthless leader to suppress the local population so that the US exploitation of local resources could continue.

This template was used for over 50 more successful coups in Central and South America over the next 100 years. The template proved less successful for Asia, where resistance groups were a lot more adept at defending their own land, leading to prolonged wars that the US eventually lost, or at least did not get their intended outcome, but at great cost. But even failed wars are a boon to those who profit from wars. as the US military-industrial complex well knows.

With many countries releasing themselves from exploitation, the US moved to a new template of using the huge economic power of the US dollar. Using the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), along with free-trade agreements that favoured US companies, the US forced their style of exploitative economic policies upon even their allies, often leading to worse domestic economic climates in them. A variant is to rope countries into military deals like the F-35 that result in escalating capitol and operational costs for decades. Pure economic exploitation without violence.

Unfortunately for the citizens of the US, but not its elites, the strength of the US dollar and the loss of locale US manufacturing due by the corporate outsourcing of almost all manufacturing to cheaper countries, has left the US with huge debts that even immediate local production could not remedy. The huge tax reductions for the rich and corporations, along with massive tariffs, has led to the largest transfer of wealth from the mass of US society to the most elite. This is resulting in the US being asset-stripped of its value as it would be too expensive to fix.

Together with the gutting of many US departments by leaders who want to destroy them, the US is becoming a feckless banana republic for its elites to run amok without government or citizen interference.

There has been a lot of propaganda used by the elites to get their way.

The North American continent received several waves of settlers from Europe from the early 17^th century on, all looking to escape the religious intolerance in their homelands and find their own place in the New World. From this outlook of optimism, later waves saw great opportunities out West of the Eastern States and somehow saw that their colonisation was divinely ordained, becoming known as Manifest destiny. With this self-righteousness they massacred or drove native tribes from their lands. It is easy to think about superiority with advanced weapons to wield.

The related delusion is that of American exceptionalism, where somehow the US was naturally superior due to its history and that they had thrown off their colonial shackles, becoming a country by their own hand, and set up their own rules. In that, they conveniently forget that up until them, countries were not really a thing until city-states conquered enough land and developed a sense of national identity at around the same time, and so were also setting up their own new sets of rules. But the mindset settled in with elites and was easy enough to sell to those they wanted to exploit.

Armed with these twin delusional concepts, the US elites sold the idea to its citizens and other countries that they were entitled to have a say in how the world was run. This accelerated after having gained huge wealth from exploiting countries that had exhausted a lot of their armaments at the start of WWII, and using that to build extensive manufacturing facilities that enabled them to walk into the war with a significant advantage. The story they sold themselves was that it was just their natural superiority than their ruthless exploitation of the weak.

Unfortunately, it is the same delusion that is blinding the masses and near elites from seeing how it is being sabotaged, while they somehow think that their society is naturally resistant to such exploitation. That means that they are not rapidly putting into place the resources that will actually stop it. This is because those resources, like unions, were stripped by Reagan's policies from the early 1980s. All means of mobilising opposition had been weakened to the point of being vague possibilities in a palette of half-baked ideas that would need decades to re-establish as a defense.

While delusions can inspire activity, they can also hobble actions that prevent nefarious activities. That means that until the delusions are delt with, the US has a future that will not serve the mass of its citizens by lumping them with massive debts while its elites are given free reign to exploit them and the world. The collapse of the US as a nation serving anything but elites is deliberate, and any action by Trump or politicians as they run amok shows the elites just how much the population and institutions will tolerate. If this is not what you want, actively resist, not just protest.