America in Decline? - Conclusion

So, with all of those things out, what should one look for to determine the decline of an empire?

As I said, that is a huge topic, and one that I'm not sure has ever been satisfactorily answered by anyone. The best things, possibly, to do, though, would be to take a historical look at the decline of the other large empires. Not an interpretive look, but a historical one.

The Greek Empire: It's difficult to say this far out and with as few resources as there are, but the current best guess was that when the alliance between Athens and Sparta died, the Greek Empire died with it. The Empire existed as a unity between various city-states, with Athens and Sparta as the mind and the backbone respectively. The Empire couldn't survive with one of each of those things.

So, to relate that to today – if the US states start to break off, the US empire would come to a crashing end. Which seems eminently logical.

The Roman Empire: Despite the Church's gentle re-writing of history, it wasn't hedonism that brought down the Empire, and it wasn't really barbarian attacks either. It was the structure of the Empire itself. The Roman Empire was made Christian and split by Emperor Constantine into two halves, and the eastern half survived intact well into the Age of Imperialism, and an argument can be made that they survived very nearly to the modern day. The western side, what some call True Rome, did break apart, bit by bit, but there is one part still with us even today – the city of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church ruled medieval Europe as much as, maybe even more than, the Empire did, and it is a strong influence on the nations of the world today. So, in a way, the Roman Empire is STILL with us.

But what made its military control break apart? The Romans never had that large a military. Unlike the peoples around them, every male person of a certain age who could wield a sword wasn't a warrior. The Romans had an army. Which does add a great deal of skill and professionalism to your warriors, but it also means that only a narrow fraction of your available populace fight. So, the Roman Empire hired mercenaries, and mercenaries have to be paid. Which aggravated an already sore problem.

The Empire was based not on conquest, but on loot. Every country that Rome invaded was subsequently looted of the treasure, and then also had to pay a tribute of (lesser) wealth every year. All those new territories have to be governed, though. Which costs money. And all of their rebellions have to be put down, which costs even more money. And the administration of such a vast empire causes the need for an equally vast bureaucracy back home to administer it, which costs even still more money. Which is fine as long as new conquests are rolling in every generation to pay for the empire. But eventually, you run into the difficulty of having too much of your army and wealth occupied controlling the territory you've got, and no one close who's wealthy enough to bother conquering. And then your empire starts to starve for money.

Which was a problem made even worse by debt. The Roman Empire ran on debt, especially when no new conquests were rolling in, and the costs of Empire never went down, and the non-unified and fractious peoples of the west were an ever-rebellious drain on Roman coffers.

Due to the tax structure and the powerful and controlling financial system of the Roman Empire, Rome essentially went bankrupt. It decided it couldn't afford maintaining all those rebellious – and now rather poor, after all the looting – colonies any more, and so it began to retreat. Not all at once, but bit by bit, letting the more costly and distant countries go, until it retreated altogether.

So, if the US government ever becomes financially exhausted, in debt way over their head to the uncaring financiers, with no ability to print money to inflate that debt away, then the US Empire will break apart due to inability to pay for it. Which would likely happen even faster than it did for Rome, since the loot of the US Empire (of which there is great deal, by the way), doesn't get distributed to the US much at all.

Many people site the Roman Empire in comparisons to the US Empire, drawing many parallel conclusions therein, but a far better comparison would be the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Empire was founded on looting a vast overseas network of colonies, taking both the wealth, goods, and labor of many different peoples and enriching a very few merchant-lords.

Interestingly enough, even with all that loot rolling in, the Spanish Empire only grew more mired in debt. The larger the Empire, the more enemies it made, but also the more arrogant it became, losing what allies it had already won, until it was all alone. The nature of its army allowed it survive, alone and in debt like that, its soldiers often unpaid and even unfed, for a very long time.

But the loot rolling in didn't do much for the rest of Spain, either. It made a few people very rich, but in doing so, it utterly ruined the Spanish economy. The loot was often in the form of large amount of gold, which was essentially money, which essentially worked about the same as if the government had started printing hoardes of money. Those who were part of the looting did well, often very well, but everyone else ended up starving, and with so much work being done out in the colonies, unable to find much work to stave off the hunger. All that, with a growing number of enemies who attacked Spain wherever they could, who then had to be fought, which wars had to be paid for by ever-more borrowing, but also thus needing a great many more soldiers, which, being the only work available, they could have, but that just left an increasing large number of trained soldiers loose and hungry in the cities whenever there wasn't a war on, and an ever-increasing number of maimed citizenry, who usually had to subsist as beggars. It wasn't pretty, and it went down hard, riddled on every side by enemies attacking it from every direction, until it started losing territory, and losing it all fast.

The US Empire is structured quite similarly to the Spanish Empire, so if the war merchants and the colonizers ever end up being completely divorced from the economy, and the US ends up still paying to defend all of that group's interests without sharing in the loot, with an increasingly poor and unemployed populace back home, but still arrogantly making enemies abroad until all it faces is a sea of enemies on every side, attacking it from every direction, then the US Empire will collapse, yanked out of its hands by all of the others peoples of the world.

So, look most of all to the level of US arrogance and its number of enemies that it thusly engenders. Therein will you likely see the US Empire's fall.