How long has it been around? What comprises it? And more importantly, like all previous empires, will it collapse?
if yes
Is it inevitable? Are there any steps to be taken to avoid it?
2011-09-20T13:49:53Z
Good answers. I see it as an economic empire we try to control through puppet governments. The Shah was one, Mubarak another. Support them, and while they run the day to day operations of the country we dictate the economic direction. If we continue on our current course collapse is inevitable, yet I believe it can be avoided, we need to throw in the towel. Washington must step away from global economic domination, its our only hope.
box of kittens2011-09-19T14:32:38Z
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see video link provided in source below
(edit: it's worth watching the entire 6+ minutes of video, at least a few times and with captions on, if possible - but the part i want to highlight here for you is at approx. 4 minutes).
We certainly do have an empire. The only real difference between our "empire" and most others is that we did not acquire our "empire" by taking over foreign lands by use of our navy. I refer specifically to The British Empire but that even applies to France and (until they lost 2 world wars) Germany. So their empires were overseas colonies controlled by use of a powerful global navy.
In our instance, there were vast lands to the west that we "conquered" by covered wagon and cavalry. Though we had a navy, we didn't need it to conquer these lands. And we didn't call it our "empire." We referred to it as our "Manifest Destiny." And since these new lands were immediately to the West, we simply annexed these various territories instead of ruling them from afar. The closest analogy to this is the expansion of Czarist Russia which, like the US, annexed its ever growing territories and ruled them directly from Moscow.
But even for us, there were some who were looking overseas and wanted the US to mimic the European powers in being a real overseas empire. That's how we acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone and even Hawaii. A little known fact is that one of the reasons for Commodore Perry's barge into Tokyo Bay was that there were some in our imperialist government that even had thoughts of expanding our "empire" across the Pacific.
I'm not sure that being an empire correlates with the tendency to collapse after an extended period of time. Most political entities ultimately fade away whether an empire or not.
as in all empires might makes right. The USA has a navy larger than the other 13 largest navies of the world combined, among other things The use of military force and economic arm twisting has allowed the US to have a very high standard of living at the expense of justice and human decency. Will the Empire collapse absolutely. The collapse will not be catastrophic rather a slow miserable decline combined with the rise of under developed nations,
You cannot believe what I just found. Seriously. This scares the crap out of me. Economic power is the key to America's superpower status. Here is how this happens. America is the head of the multinationals. She is also the Chairman of the Board of global oil suppliers. All oil customers must pay for their oil in U.S. dollars. This is the American Oil Bourse which few Americans know about. America taxes the world through this financial system. The resulting global demand for dollars has made America the main marketplace for the world to sell its goods. This offsets the cost of its huge military budget to protect the free world.
America naturally wants this status quo to continue. It now finds itself committed to maintaining its dominance in world trade and the continuing prosperity of the global markets. Towards that end it is now mobilizing its military to police troublemakers around the world to see that goods continue to cross borders and through the sea-lanes and thus keep the peace.
There is no denying the reality of this expanding reality of 'Manifest Destiny". Manifest Destiny is now quite evident in America's economic expansionism and the military expansionism into the Middle East.
There is not. We do not have Imperial policies, and when we wage war on a country, it is generally due to our want to remove the current government from power, not take it for ourselves.
If there was, I doubt it would collapse, it took two plagues that killed a third of the population and massive barbarian invasions just to cause Rome to start a decline. After that, they still lasted another 600 or so years before the Eastern Empire finally fell.