Ok but let’s be clear: there’s a reason the entire steppe + the Middle East doesn’t speak Mongolian. Insofar as the US is a steppe empire, it’s done something very different than most of the others. Namely: ASSIMILATE ASSIMILATE ASSIMILATE.
You wouldn’t call residential schools efforts at assimilation? Or the widespread removal of children from native families to adopt them into white families? Or the Dawes Act? Or the entire ideological project of “civilizing the savages”, under which most of the cruelty towards native people was justified?
Yes, there was also a lot of outright slaughter, but the policies aimed at assimilation were extensive! That’s at least a little bit different from “keep your pre-existing political structures and pay taxes to the Khan”, isn’t it?
Sometimes I think about WWII Navajo code talkers as the American nation employing one of its vassal nations as auxiliaries in war
