I don't know, when "westerners", aka the Spanish, colonized the Americas, they would arrive in a village where almost everyone was already dead of the flu before they even started a fight. It seems more violent a colonization than us spending tax money in Africa in soft influence white elephants to gain the favors of dictators.
But it's true it almost, almost, sounds like the protectorate system the French and British used there. And I'm not under any illusion we treat the locals much better in our exported factories.
But you know, the reports of our continuous and desperate colonial expansion across the world are vastly exaggerated and it seems to be mostly a complete failure so far (they seem to kill our factory owners over un paid wages a bit more than they learn our languages with abandon, for one). As someone pointed out, we didn't even get back our stolen gold from the "Republic of China", nor convinced them to join us back in a sort of S.A.R., Hong Kong-style, alliance. I don't blame them, for sure (Hong Kong isn't particularly happy about it, themselves), but we seem to be far from a colonial empire - or, let's give you that, we already have it in our local sphere around the Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou triangle and we seem to stick to it with difficulty... for now ?
I think a large missing piece to being a successful super-colonizer like Europe was in the past, is we don't have that big a gap with Africa or other candidates for invasion: China is advanced but not super advanced. The Europeans surprised the Americans with horse riders, it was that bad. Us, meh, not sure our army is worth anything or that terrifying compared to the Russian mercenaries these countries hire for their defense. All we can do is make them build cheaper iphones or some such I guess and pray they listen to us when we need them ?