The transformations set in motion by the disasters of the World Wars would continue to ripple out through the cold war period, and though the intensity and speed of change began to dampen and spread out, the change itself was no less consequential.
The US would emerge to find itself as hegemon of a world perfectly suited to its imperial instincts; not accidentally to be sure. The economic imperialism of the United States - being a slower and less readily perceptible form of violence - managed to elude for some time the trauma response of a terrorized industrial world that was rapidly accumulating wealth and urgently moving away from the horrors of mass industrialized violence and the threat of nuclear war.
The economic imperialism was aided in part by layer upon layer of economic and technological complexity, making it easier to gaslight and camouflage one's aggression after all, and mighty and deft applications of PR which took advantage of that camouflage to manipulate opinion and perception. And many of those at the bitter end of receipt would be too poor and broken to properly fight back anyway, left with few alternatives, or else they would be pushed into mounting some sort of insurgency and the wealthier powers would deploy their counterinsurgency to mop up, a process that has its own insidious consequences which we'll have to touch on later.
The policy of containment would pit the remaining great powers against each other without making that explosive direct contact, instrumentalizing the smaller poorer nations instead as proxies for the interests of empire, much like pawns on a chess board advancing the prestige of interested competitive players.
The powers of the Middle Ages expressed their aims in vicious wars of religion, but this time it was a vicious struggle over the ideological blueprint for economic organization and the structuring of class and privilege, though of course religious questions also hid behind them economic questions and matters of class and privilege; these things are just expressed differently depending on the historical constellation of human affairs.
The market vision of capital won out in the end, but the victorious United States had to have it all, and upon vanquishing its foe and destroying its last remaining threats, was unable to slow its perpetual slow economic warfare, intensifying its universal extraction and sucking the life out of whatever resided in its sphere of influence, antagonizing the resisting powers outside of its spheres of control, and reigniting a race for national survival, leading up to our present moment.
