You're right about the US is in end stage of empire, it's been obvious for some time. The US might try to go full pillage but that game will not work, folks will not accept imperialism anymore. It couldn't even hold together Iraq and Afghanistan, it won't be able to hold a vast empire through force.
It would be a mistake to directly compare Iraq to any coming wars (Afghanistan is its own category as no one has ever managed to pacify the place so I’m not holding that against the Americans).
In Iraq, America was burdened by its nation building and civilised force of good baggage. If they drop all pretences and focus exclusively on securing and extracting key resources, it’s actually a far smaller and easier task. Especially if they don’t care about openly doing war crimes and just Gaza any hotbeds of resistance and create zero-fucks-given free fire kill zones around their resource extraction facilities and transport routes.
It’s easier still if they forget about the resource extraction for themselves and merely settle for denying those resources to China, as in that case all they need to do is launch air and missile strikes on oil wells, refineries, transport infrastructure, ports and the like and don’t even need to put any boots on the ground.
They can also play good cop bad cop with their vassals where America drops the hammer on countries to topple governments that trade with China and Japanese and European companies come in after to take over the resource extraction in name while 90% of the profits and resources gets sent to America as tribute.
Armed local resistance will also be hard for China to support, especially in Latin America, as the logistics challenges and tyranny of distance takes its toll.
If America wants to break bad and be the bad guy, they can achieve far more than during the days when they still played by the rules of civilised states. Just like how Germany and Japan managed to conquer so much initially.
