History shows that they aren't really digging a hole for themselves.
This whole thing where the average person feels that they can use rules against a more powerful person? That's really an invention of maybe the last 80 years, if not more recently than that.
With the exception of that human lifetime-sized era, the vast majority of history is a bunch of psychopaths running things and getting to kill/screw whoever they wanted and steal whatever they wanted. Successful revolts are few and far between. The only real difference is the stakes.
I think you misread what I was saying. Hard power is really costly to deploy. It can work, but it is incredibly expensive and the U.S. couldn't even suppress resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza on a durable basis. Blunt deployment of these techniques will cause the U.S. to lose friends, territory, and civil unrest as the treasury drains and life domestically just gets worse and worse.
This whole thing where the average person feels that they can use rules against a more powerful person? That's really an invention of maybe the last 80 years, if not more recently than that.
With the exception of that human lifetime-sized era, the vast majority of history is a bunch of psychopaths running things and getting to kill/screw whoever they wanted and steal whatever they wanted. Successful revolts are few and far between. The only real difference is the stakes.