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Thank you my friend PO1 Tony Holland for posting the link to tomdispatch.com web article by Alfred McCoy, Whose Planet Are We On? posted on March 21, 2021

As a student of history, colonization went on for millennia. After the collapse of colonial empires [after the great war], deploying of forces overseas from the French Foreign Legion in the mid-20th century to an expansion to Soviet in Vietnam and later Afghanistan, US conventional forces in NATO, SEATO, etc. before Korea, Somalia, etc.
Then Iran and its proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to an extent and other assets in Yemen, etc. beginning in the 1980's [after the takeover of the US embassy.

"Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that would be genuinely funny, if it weren’t so grim. You’ve certainly heard about that deal President Trump made with the Taliban ensuring that the last 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by May 21st. It’s been in the news for weeks now as a potential crisis for the Biden administration. Whatever may still be up for grabs there, however, one thing was a given: that 2,500 figure. After all, the president signed on to that agreement and who would have had better information about this country’s troop deployments than the commander-in-chief? (Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the 700 or more U.S. troops left in Syria after American officials assured President Trump that almost all of them had been withdrawn.)
As it happens, only the other day the New York Times revealed that there was indeed a tiny counting error (whoops!) when it came to that number. If you included all the “off the books” special operations forces and various “transitioning” units in Afghanistan, the total was actually… hmmm… 3,500 (if that’s even accurate). Not only that, but stationed in numerous other countries “from Syria to Yemen to Mali,” as the Times reporters put it, are similarly off-the-books and unacknowledged U.S. military personnel meant to fight America’s disastrous global war on terror.
In other words, almost two decades after that “war” across much of the Greater Middle East and ever-expanding parts of Africa was launched by President George W. Bush with the invasion of Afghanistan (a “war” theoretically aimed, according to the secretary of defense of that moment, at 60 countries), presidents may come and go, but the U.S. military just fights on. Engaged as it is in imperial conflicts of disaster, its high command is clearly convinced that it’s in charge and the commander-in-chief be damned.
And yet here may be the strangest thing of all: forget those global conflicts (one more disastrous than the next), all those garrisons around the planet, all the invasions and interventions of this century. In this country, the United States is essentially never treated as the great imperial power (or even, at this moment, the faltering one) that it is — not in the mainstream media, anyway.'

FYI Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. LTC (Join to see) COL Mikel J. Burroughs Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen Maj William W. 'Bill' Price SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SMSgt David A Asbury PO2 David Dunlap PO2 (Join to see) TSgt David L. Maj Marty Hogan SFC Chuck Martinez SFC William Farrell MSgt Robert "Rock" Aldi