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Why Is It So Hard to Imagine the End of American Empire?
(jacobin.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Because:
Mutual defence pacts, world bank lenders, and trade organizations are not empires, the USA has been giving away territory for many decades.
A shallow understanding of history is that the USA has only just begun to decline and could take more than 50 years of steadily worsening to see any uprisings or collapse.
Until they overthrow inconvenient regimes on the other side of the world for sport, then they become empires.
What makes an empire is using military to take over and hold large territories like China, Nazi Germany, or the USSR have done.
Like how the USA got Texas?
Before and during the year 1845? Yeah, like that.
Taking territory and giving it to vassals does not, in fact, make one less of an empire. Britain had the East India Company running India yet it'd be ridiculous to say that India wasn't part of the British Empire before the Raj. Also you get three guesses for why how America managed to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Oh wow we're pulling out the late 18th century trivia, now?
Hows that Vassal state of Cuba working out?
Are you critiquing 2 as a shallow understanding of history, or saying that even a shallow understanding is all that's necessary to be convinced? Because I agree with the former.
US debt is going to be an immediate and pressing problem in a few years at most. Countries are already pulling out of US bonds. The petrodollar is unsustainable without security guarantees in the Middle East, where Iran has already chased us out. Without the world loaning us money, the empire will collapse overnight.