The Liberal ideology of the international rules-based order has, since its inception, been a straitjacket for the United States, designed to constrain America's ability to defend its own interests while everyone else brazenly ignored the rules in order to advance theirs.

I don't totally agree with this. Yes the US has been somewhat restrained by the fiction of international order, but it has a lot of sneaky interventions under its belt via the CIA and proxy conflicts. This is far from the first regime change in South America alone.

Whenever a US administration did commit to military action, their perceived obligations used as a pretext to intentionally bog them down with multiple decades of obligatory forever war whenever an, which those administrations were of course fine with because they were on the take.

You kind of made your own counterargument there. If the forever wars weren't massive money laundering operations, they would have been shut down. The perceived obligations were part convictions of Bush Jr (I grant him that much) and part marketing campaign.