Yeah there’s a bunch of vintage sci-fi like that. I tend to forget which ones are doing it sarcastically and which ones have just drunk the nationalistic Kool aid. There’s another one like it (blanking on the author and title at the moment, maybe Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper or something very much like it) where it starts with some leader on a colony on some new planet in the empire. And it’s written from his perspective, so it feels like he’s the hero protagonist. But then, the perspective shifts and you realize that he’s just the worst and it’s basically Fern Gully in space. It must have been one the stories James Cameron plagarised for Avatar.