It really is pretty strange watching the United States act on the world stage - and having knowledge of that history for that matter. There is a basic hostility towards anyone who refuses to be in general alignment with the hegemon's range of interests, but right at the point where that hostility is most veiled, one glimpses a telling tension between symbolic act and intent.
Take for example the decades-long history of the use and abuse of economic sanctions, tariffs, payment systems, reserve currency, and the like, much of which betrays a profound hostility and disregard for the economic and political wellbeing of the target nations, but which at the same time assumes some sort of veneer of fairness and justice to present the hostile actions as "tit-for-tat" responses that are wholly justified.
The range of this behavior does change across racial, ethnic, and class lines for starters. Typically, the more developed a country is, and the closer to a useful economic peer that country is perceived as, the more veiled and obscured the imperial aggression. The more of an existential threat that country is considered, and the more economically developed it is in turn, the more work is put in towards employing legalistic, economic, and political propaganda to pull public opinion in a direction that warrants more direct and naked aggression, which is work that implies a considered wellspring of aggression in the first place.
A large part of this has to do with the way in which modern liberal ideology works. If you are perceived as a relative equal - largely economically at least - then you are bound under the same general global legal and economic framework which has been carefully built up over the last century. This is a framework that, through its universality, binds together all those participating under it, so that any overtly hostile and capricious attack on an adherent to this system tends to damage the credibility of the entire system as a whole.
That legal and economic framework - however rational its underpinnings - functions on a faith in continuity: that the system can be predictably navigated, and that the laws behind it are not capricious, but fairly arrived at over the course of practical experience, precedent, and good faith. By many, this is no longer earnestly believed, but however much damage such a collective conviction has undergone, there is still a mass belief in it, or at least a dependence on its functionality, however desperate.
Because in a way law is manufactured to carry out a purpose. Modern law is built onto an endlessly complex array of practicalities, theories, and time-worn customs which are put together as a society's development progresses, and which are gradually scaled up to account for higher and higher levels of legal governance depending on the case.
Over time trust in law has become habituated precisely because it is so baroque: as with every large scale social project, the practice has been taken over with armies of specialists whose life training and labor goes towards understanding and administrating the law as it pertains to various spheres of life. We simply have to trust (or otherwise accede to) them, because it is so huge and so omnipresent; what else is there to be done? And of course this too is rapidly changing along with the changing political compositions of developed nations around the world.
As we now know, large scale wars are incredibly costly in many ways. With instant communication and various forms of rapid transportation, modern war has scaled up enormously, to say the least of the instruments of destruction themselves. They lead to mass destruction, social upheaval, and oftentimes profound rearrangements of global power. They're messy and chaotic; bad news especially for top-heavy and sclerotic great powers at the tops of pyramids.
Historically, the revving up of the great wars has entailed states of affairs that have spiraled far out of anyone's control, where they were experienced as a sort of overwhelming pull, not unlike that of a black hole. Even the aggressors themselves were responding to the chaotic forces of their collapsing societies, just as one may lurch forward to compensate for tripping backward. Which is not a justification by any means, but some attempt at an explanation.
Save a quickly unraveling global emergency, nations - including, usually, the hegemon - work to exercise hostility through these legal and economic channels while they are still functional and legitimate. They save on time and energy, as they have already been built up, and they atomize and individualize conflict, keeping most of the body politic intact, as opposed to a great war, which rends it every which way.
Much like the neoliberal who pooh-poohs the state ideologically, and then turns around and makes extensive use of it as the powerful tool that plays a huge part in maintaining that project from the beginning.
But of course, using economic and legal systems in this way tend to corrupt them anyway. It just makes these things happen a little more slowly.
