Morris is a propagandist, whitewashing colonial-imperialism for the sake of posterity and progeny. Call it the bigotry of low time preference towards civilizations, call it misguided mystic zionism compounded by centuries of guilt of identity and millennial discrimination, call it international capital. The American founders understood that use of power is the trap of all great power and worked to curtail the accumulation of it by maintaining the settler ethos in the American mind. Now it has been replaced by 'a nation of immigrants'.
With Asia we see the fraying of the American ideals, betrayed and exposed as an empty power grab at cultural hegemony, a molten liquid setting into a misshapen lump, waiting to be squeezed, chipped and remelted again. A world war will be necessarily fought over this anti-human humanist idea, since people are not liquid and can only be squeezed so hard before they crack and splinter.
21st century American can only be reasoned with from an equal position of power, and the madness that spreads top down from the entrenched political apparatus is fanatical in its devotion to self-serving narratives, which will lead to more and more erratic and unpredictable outcomes, until corruption and despotism rule the day.
China has always dealt with ideological theocracies with subversion and reasoned pragmatism, it survived the mongols and the japanese and it will survive the americans too. what survives of the extended western roman empire? likely the political monuments of worship too large to tear down and a few choice words of english.