The American hegemon is an unprecedented threat to world peace because it wants to rule the world

When I came to Romania in the late 1990s every Romanian I knew opposed the USA intervening in Kosovo. Later they were utterly cynical about American motives in invading Iraq in 2003. How right they were.

David Gibb talks in this podcast about how neocons in the very influential 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) argued that America's primary post-Cold War goal was maintaining absolute global military dominance, how humanitarian reasons for wars and interventions (to support women, minorities, later homosexual rights) were at first cynical ploys by the neocons who later came very much to believe their own propaganda.

The neocons from the defeat in Vietnam onwards saw Israel as a model of how the USA should be: aggressive, with little interest in diplomacy. This increased the importance of Israel in the US.

He says Ukraine in 2014 (and now) was a neocon project, just like the current war in Iran.

'To the victor belong the spoils' Professor Gibbs quotes Trump saying about taking Venezuelan oil while Rubio rules Venezuela like a colony - Trump is original not in his policy but because 'he says the quiet part out loud' to quote the voguish phrase. 

But I'd add that the hypocrisy was very important - hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue as La Rochefoucauld said. Without the idealistic screen America is very corrupted and decadent. This does smell of decline.

Iraqi oil is still controlled by the US, which all Romanians  assumed in 2003 was the reason for the invasion. In fact, there were many reasons and the most powerful we now know was false intelligence from Israel.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.