My thesis is that these things are deeply related. The plan to exploit the Americas gave birth to the various states of both continents. This exploitative drive was fundamental to the identity and culture of the USA, though it was framed in citizen’s minds as “free enterprise”, and this spirit of free enterprise, which in reality only thinly masks exploitation, became globalized culture and American dominance in the 20th century. I see no conflation. The one - exploitation *of* the Americas as a continent - leads to the other: the exploitation (of its own lands and indigenous peoples, and of the wider world) *by* America as the nation that emerged from that process.