Every empire comes to an end. But not necessarily for the exact same reasons. There are similarities of course, because all empires overreach. All empires end up with entrenched bureaucracies that bleed initiative and effectiveness from the imperial efforts. All empires face competition from either peer enemies or a collection of enemies that match or exceed their abilities.
However, the specific reasons why empires get into these situations of decline can vary. Britain lost its empire because Churchill, and the British leadership of his generation, squandered it on ensuring that Germany did not become a true continental power that could rival them and France. The Soviet Union lost its empire because its founding ideology, communism, undermined its ability to outproduce competing societies, like the United States. But the overarching similarity is that empires always collapse because they go too far in their goals and actions. They overreach.
The same will happen with the United States,
“…when objectives are greater than measures, then defeat is certain. Not all of today’s statesmen and strategists are clear on this point. The 1996 U.S. Department of Defense Report contains this premise from President Clinton: “As the world’s most powerful nation, we have a leadership obligation, and when our interests and sense of values are subject to great danger we will take action.” When he spoke those words, obviously even Clinton was unaware that national interests and sense of values are strategic objectives of two completely different scales. If we say that the former is an objective which American power can protect through action, the latter is neither an objective that its power can achieve nor is an objective which the United States should pursue outside its own territory. “World’s number one,” an ideology corresponding to “isolationism,” always makes the Americans tend to pursue unlimited objectives as they expand their national power. But this is a tendency which in the end will lead to tragedy. A company which has limited resources but which is nevertheless keen to take on unlimited responsibilities is headed for only one possible outcome, and that is bankruptcy.”
Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiangsui, 1999, Unrestricted Warfare, p.180.
In other words, the United States believes that it is their role, or calling, to ensure that other nations are conformed to their values and beliefs of nationhood. They want to use their limited resources to achieve this unlimited goal, and this will inevitably fail. To put it another way, the United States wants to conform the rest of the world to its image, and it simply does not have the power to do this, but it is ideologically driven to keep trying to do this. So this can only end up in disaster.
Empires often want to conform the world to their own image. Rome sought to do this through the Pax Romana. Alexander the Great sought to do this with Hellenization. But empires always fail to achieve this goal because even mighty empires have limited power. And also, the more powerful they get, the more the people of all nations are drawn into the centre of the empire and this changes the empire from within and causes it to eventually collapse in on itself.
By the end of the Roman Empire, it was neither Roman in nationality, language, or even culture. It was a small state on the Bosphorus (Byzantium) that spoke Greek and traced its population’s lineage to many different peoples. The American Empire is no longer led by the sons of the revolution, but by a collection of foreign peoples from all over the world, some European and many not, and very few of those leaders are of the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the dominant founding peoples of the United States. They have been overcome by the world they sought to overcome.
The United States will fail because it is seeking to achieve something that it just does not have the ability to achieve: the conforming of the whole world to its image. The United States may have gotten into this situation for different reasons than Rome, Greece, or other empires, but the result will be the same, total and utter collapse. The irony is that the more an empire seeks to conform the world to its image, the more the world ends up conforming that empire to the various images of the people that overcome that empire. As this process of demographic change increases, the more the empire is corrupted from the inside and the less capable it becomes of achieving its overarching goals.
You would think nations would have learnt this lesson by now. Some may have, but the United States is learning this lesson the hard way again in our time, and as a result, the world is in for some years of serious tumults.
