Sounds like mission accomplished

You’re not entirely wrong, but you have to understand that there a couple levels to US foreign policy. One the material base you mentioned, where the US wants to take out possible competitors all over the globe. The other is that of the “idealists,” the neoconservatives who are the US foreign policy establishment. In what sense they are “conservative” has always been a little unclear, because their understanding of geopolitics is in a lot of ways ultra-left: the US is an armed base for freedom and liberalism, and if the country does not continually export, via war and color revolutions, its own version of “democracy,” that same democracy at home will wither away and die. During the Bush years, I thought it was just rhetoric, but the sheer suicidal stupidity of their actions in Ukraine has since convinced me they actually believe all of this. They tend to be opposed by the Brzenzkyites, who favor a much more hard-headed approach to foreign policy – the divide-and-conquer game essentially, such as Nixon played with China and the USSR. The Brzenzkyites were once the foreign policy establishment, but since the 90s their place has been mostly taken by the neoconservatives.

The neoconservatives have been enabled by US corporations and mega-conglomerates who, for the sake of immediate profits, want global competitors taken out; without this base, the neocons would never have risen to power. But because they are idealists, the neocons regularly go above and beyond all rational neccesity, promoting sanctions when diplomacy would have worked, wars when sanctions would have been sufficient, etc, all with a goal toward toppling “undemocratic” regimes and ushering in “democracy” – the latter never happens, but here we have the madman’s dilemma, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This cycle of escalation creates mass death abroad and social and economic problems back at home, which latter do end up hurting the US ruling classin some degree. The long range goals of US corporations would probably be better served by the slow, methodical approach of Brzenzkyite foreign policy, but capital is by nature short-sighted and geared toward immediate profit. Thus, the US ruling class has created a monster it cannot well control, leading to a sort of prisoner’s dilemma. When neocon wars fail, as they always do, to achieve the objectives set out by their ideologues, capital profits; but that same failure makes the US populace disillusioned with the neocons, and creates political pressures that put the US ruling class in danger of losing their attack dog in Washington. That is why a big portion of the US elite were freaked out about Trump. His policies were not much different from those of his predecessors, but his election articulated a kind of right-wing populist distrust in the mechanisms of global American power, which many members of the US ruling class took as a sign of things to come.