Do you think it relies on its military dominance in order to extract that surplus?
Geopolitical power is quite complex. The US does at various points uses it's power to punish countries that act against US economic interests.
It's very hard to estimate the economic values extracted via wiretapping everything and using that information when it's needed.
In general if you would predict based on economic history that value transfer to the party with the military power is happening and you see that value transfer is happening, it should get you thinking. "Cui bono?" is a good question if you are dealing with intransparent complex systems.
If you don't see where the magician uses his skills, that can just means that the magician is good at his craft. If someone is really powerful you usually don't know how they get their results. Information warfare is a key part of US military thinking.
As far as European countries go Germany is the country with the biggest amount of US military occupation and it's the European country that exports the most. Of course it's just correlation ;)
When it comes to dealing with secret power I found Leoluca Orlando worth reading. As major of Palermo he fought the Mafia with makes him know what he's talking about. He did fought the building of US military bases because missile defense isn't the only thing that you can do with military bases. From that perspective it also makes a lot more sense why Russia has such a problem with Star Wars which probably won't work for it's stated purpose anyway.
Bin Laden achieved one of his political/military goals after 9/11-- US bases were removed from Saudi Arabia.
In the big survey, political views are divided into large categories so that statistics are possible. This article is an attempt to supply a text field so that we can get a little better view of the range of beliefs.
My political views aren't adequately expressed by "libertarian". I call myself a liberal-flavored libertarian, by which I mean that I want the government to hurt people less. The possibility that the government is giving too much to poor people is low on my list of concerns. I also believe that harm-causing processes should be shut down before support systems
So, what political beliefs do you have that don't match the usual meaning of your preferred label?