[throwup238]

Wiping out the natives isn’t the same thing as waging a war. Even from the beginning the European empires had very tenuous control over their New World colonies* and once they had to actually fight wars against well equipped European colonists to defend their control, it was a disaster for them (Bolivar, American Revolution, French and Indian war, etc).

The closest counterexample is probably the partitioning of China but that’s got its own mitigating factors

* they couldn’t even enforce the most basic sovereignty like when Spain introduced the New Laws and the encomenderos were like “lol no”