If it is to achieve its military and economic objectives, the US's choices are quite limited. The native overseer/client state module is becoming too costly, at the same time as it is declining in effectiveness.
I realize that the standard American response to this argument is "just nuke it all," however if you put yourself in the position of the American oil company employee who will be living and working in the nuclear wasteland, supervising the Filipino dollar-a-days, or more appropriately, if you put yourself in the position of his survivors, you may begin to have some misgivings about this option.
If you are part of the oil company's legal team, it is unlikely that you will be a proponent of "nuke it all."
While the US could easily legislate a waiver for illness, injury or death that might result from employment in a hazardous area for companies in certain industries, that would put the oil companies in an awkward position recruitment-wise.
There could also be some unforseen impact on the resources themselves. Radioactive oil might not generate the profits its extractors had hoped.
Technology has changed things in many areas of life, from weapons, both type and availability, to mobility, and it would not be wise to underestimate the advances in communication. Today, for the first time in the history of human activity, it is possible for any human being to communicate in real time, with any other human being almost anywhere on earth, as long as both have access to modems and a common language.
This has dramatically impacted smooth implementation of US policy, not so much domestically, where careful media strategies have largely desensitized the US news-watching and voting sectors, who have developed a variety of techniques to variously justify, applaud, or refuse to believe many aspects of how their tax dollars are spent, but among the target populations, it is a different story.
Not everybody in the Majority World has internet access, far from it, but more people than ever before have access to information today, whether an internet cafe, or a cousin who has been to a city with an internet cafe, and the nature of US operations necessarily renders them somewhat transparent in the field: people cannot ignore the fact that it was a US operative who shot their brother in law.
There have also been some social changes. While it is true that the US has managed for decades to control large populations by the simple technique of identifying native overseer candidates from the target nation who are capable and willing to sell their grandmothers for the right price, this method is becoming less effective and exponentially more costly.
Think of this: Less than a half century ago, in the United States, racial apartheid was the law of the land, and it was not difficult to find even African-Americans who would, even when no whites were listening, express their sincere view that this was as it should be. Today, one would be hard pressed to find even an elderly African-American anywhere in the United States who would agree with such a view.
As the blip of pre-eminence of Europe (and spawn) fades from the radar screen, the notion that Sahib knows what is best continues to decline in popularity throughout the Majority World, and while some westerners, especially Americans, are quite sincere in their closely-held belief in Manifest Destiny and the innate superiority of white western culture, the victims of the doctrine who share it grow smaller in number.
The two views are irreconcilable. I remember reading somewhere about a lady expressing her frustration over trying to discuss gender issues with relatives in rural Latin America. "There is," she said, "not much conversation to be had with someone who believes as deeply and unshakably that you are property as you believe they are not."
That illustrates the unbridgeable gap.
The United States simply cannot keep pouring money down the holes of even the most obligingly draconian regimes in the face of the groundswell of conviction among the rank and file populace that the land, the resources, and they themselves are not the property of either the United States nor the native overseer, and the vast armies of secret police, torturers and death squads find themselves, and their own families at increasing risk from both directions - the native overseer insists that they murder their countrymen when directed to do so - this is his job, if he does not do it, he loses the dollars, and possibly his life.
At the same time, the intended targets' tolerance for dollahoism and collaboration dwindles. The death squad leader demands more money from the native overseer, who must pay him or eliminate him, and his replacement will not be on the job long before he too demands more, and that more must come from the American taxpayers.
The taxpayers are more than happy to pay for it, as long as they do not have to see photographs of the wetwork, but the present system has reached the point of diminishing returns.
It was hoped that Taliban-esque faith-based control would do the job, but that too has its limits - and its glitches.
The only chance of securing the resources for the US, even with the implementation of population reduction strategies so intensive as to jeopardize US contractors and resource extraction personnel and all the potential legal vulnerability that presents for the key defense and energy sectors, is a Guantanamo-style lockdown of the very considerable non-liquidated population, and when one considers applying this to a swath of stretching from South Asia to the Mediterrenean, with tributaries encompassing Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America, the limited efficacy of the client state module, for reasons stated above, becomes apparent.
Achieving the goal can only be done with boots on the ground. Lots and lots and lots of boots. The combined population to be subdued is several times that of the entire population of the United States, including infants, the very elderly, and the infirm in the US and taking into account an average of 50% population reduction in the target regions via a variety of methods.
Even the impressment of every ambulatory soul residing in the United States from 7 to 75 years of age will not be sufficient.
But it will be a start. And combined with maximum-benefit use of sustained population reduction, and added to, not replacing, the client state system, it will be possible for the United States to accomplish a good part of its objectives, at least in the short term.
The long term is hardly relevant.