US wars functioned to prove emergent power against entrenched aristocracies

Evidence

Such wars have served multiple and multiply interactive agendas. They have sought to establish greatness as an emerging world power; to ensure imperial expansion not least to control global resources for a population unbounded in its desires; to claim continuing nobility for a nation obsessed with its place among the anciens régimes of power; to reassert state homogeneity for a population increasingly and increasingly assertively heterogeneous; to insist upon its own security by way of policing the world. The wars amount in sum to the pouvoir nouveau constantly and loudly having to prove, to assert itself over and against power’s latest aristocracy, both domestically and globally. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 277