When you hover over the Whitehouse in a spacecraft a quarter the size of the moon, you’re making a statement to one the biggest superpowers on the planet Earth, and it’s not to say you’ve accepted the President’s invitation to come down to have afternoon coffee.
The aliens species in Independence Day didn’t so much declare war on America as announce the beginning of an extermination when they blasted the Whitehouse into ash in a single beam of dazzling white. The country was in ruins long before the aliens suffered their first casualty.