The US Revolution was justified as being in protest against taxes, but taxes raised to pay for the Seven Years War which (chronologically, if not causally) began with George Washington ambushing French troops and resulted in colonists gaining significant territory. One of the nowadays less romanticised causes of the revolution itself was the block on westward expansion of the colonies by the British government too, incidentally.

Your outline there also ignores the many wars and atrocities that describe the westward expansion of the USA (and beyond, the Philippines for example) as it actually did happen too, they very much did not begin their imperialism with the start of the cold war.

but to say that this war is imperialist is to legitimize the Confederacy’s claim to preserve the institution of American slavery.

Morality doesn't change facts. If it is imperialistic then it is, no matter what it means to the Confederacy. At that point it is also possible to question if imperialism is always a bad thing.

Are you saying the south didn't want to preserve slavery? You'll note your definition of imperialism doesn't include anything about right or wrong, just one nation imposing it's will on another. This is what people mean when they describe liberal politics as vibe based - it fits the definition exactly, but you don't feel it's imperialist because it was the morally right thing to do.

While America wasn't the imperialist power in the world wars, they were thoroughly imperialist wars, by either definition, between European countries.

Hey I don’t have time to do a whole infodump style reply but off the dome Washington profited immensely from the revolutionary war because he was a land speculator and the us needed to get into ww2 so it could stop the empire of japan from taking control of all the island territories it chased Spain off of.

I wouldn’t personally call the first example imperialism because you gotta make a distinction between Byzantine and American somehow and the one from imperialism the highest stage of capitalism seems appropriate and answers a lot of questions but the second one is literally imperialism by any definition you wanna call it.

Also even if you fully reject Lenin’s work you gotta grapple with the historical facts that the eastern states didn’t really create a program of mass import of raw materials from the western expansion states and complete control over the western states government to the detriment of the people who lived in them to the extent that the nation they represented did to the Philippines for example. The distinction between imperialism and colonialism for the modern age helps with that and fits many other modern examples, most notably israel. Israel isnt doing imperialism to Palestinians, they are doing colonialism.

Regarding Americas western expansion I am compressing a million pages of history and some really powerful counterexamples into a did they didn’t they statement here and I know that.

Like I said I don’t have time to do the other two without referring to a bunch of books to get my claims perfectly exactly irrefutably correct on the (no offense intended) Redditor instance.