All true. But there are differences. Black Americans take pride in the Tuskegee Airmen, the best American pilots of WWII. The Navajo code talkers were proud to serve the empire their grandparents were forced to join to defeat Japan in WWII. There are no Tadzhiks or Uzbeks on the Russian Supreme Court. Putin is the Russian Supreme Court, legislature and executive. You could compare the Cherokees’ fate to the Crimean Tatars. But today’s Cherokee live far better and more free than today’s Tatars, Tuvans and Tadzhiks.

The history of western dominance is not just about conquest, but institution export. The global south, to prosper, must imitate the limits on state power and legal structures of western constitutionalist states, as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan have done. Ask a Filipino, Thai or Ethiopian if he’d prefer living under local or the EU’s and the Anglosphere’s type of institutions and laws. We can easily forecast the reply.