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There's no tension at all, you're reading that into what I'm saying. You can simultaneously believe "all's fair in love and war" and "I find this particular tactic cowardly and dishonorable." Pearl Harbor was simultaneously a distasteful sneak attack (IMO) while being totally "fair."
Maybe the confusion is in the meaning of the word "fair" in "all's fair in love and war?" To me it means everything is possible, not that everything is morally equivalent. In fact, people seem to mostly invoke the phrase when does something shocking and morally dubious.
If your point is that American settlers did fair but dishonorable things at some point in the multi-century settlement of north America, then, well, yes of course, the number of people and the length of time mean that the odds were very high that things like that would happen. When American settlers pretended to give blankets as a gesture of goodwill that were actually carrying contagious diseases, or when they broke treaties and suddenly attacked peaceful natives, they were acting dishonorably and disgracefully. But most of the conflict was not like that. Hostilities were often open and direct.
Re. Russia's treatment of indigenous people, is that really a fair comparison? I don't think Russians want to live in, settle, develop, and convert Kamchatka into a core part of Russian civilization. Most of the Russian Far East seems to me to still be much more like a territory than actual "Russian land." It's a similar contrast as that between, say, Massachusetts and Alaska. Alaskan natives seem to be doing a lot better than the tribes of New England, many of whom no longer even exist. I think you'd need to look at how indigenous people who lived in Western Russia were treated.
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