this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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There are never "less imperialists". It's a function of the power difference between the haves and have not.
Go read any history book on what happens when an empire collapses. Here's a spoiler: it's not good for the vast majority of people.
More than ever, the world is a zero sum game. We know the resources, we know their limits and we know the trajectory of our pale blue dot. If you thought the Pax Americana was bad, wait till you see existential power struggles between peer states.
It's also a function of what the haves want from the have nots. China for example has no interest in global domination, and nothing to gain from it, but also: Yes, and I want America to have less power.
What? The collapse of the British and French empires, and less recently the Roman Empire, were nothing if not good for their subject peoples. You want to tell me India would've been better off under the Raj?
Yeah that's the fucking thing about those, they can actually end. Imperial rule is just nonstop stagnation and suffering, because imperial states attempt to enforce states of being that are fundamentally unsustainable. One look at the Middle East should be all you need on that front, with decades-long power struggles that simply won't end because foreign powers keep supporting their favorite side. But more importantly: Would you want to be subject to the whims of imperial rulers thousands of miles away?
You clearly have an incredibly optimistic view and I commend you for that. The raw facts are on my side though.
The world, objectively, has been at an absolute high water mark for peace. The conflicts that happen are nowhere as sweeping or brutal as the historical norm. The headlines that cover our feed about tens or hundreds of thousands dying would be footnotes compared to the wars, atrocities, plagues and disasters of the past.
American hegemony began just like any other: you worry about your neighborhood until your control over it expands your concerns to the wider world. If you told someone in the late 1800s that the need to control Puerto Rico and Hawaii as naval bases would lead to needing 128 foreign military bases worldwide in a little over a century they wouldn't believe you.
Only "nothing but good" if you think self determination infinitely outweighs the violent political turmoil and instability of the power vacuum. Not to mention many of those subjugated people came out the other side still under the thumb of the new American/Soviet influence.
Wait, are we talking about the same Western Roman collapse where basically all measures indicate a precipitous drop in quality of life for the average person in Europe? Where we famously lost a massive chunk of knowledge and some technology that still can't be reproduced today? Where stability was mainly found in the growth of other empires and the expansion of church influence?
True, but that doesn't mean I want to chance living through them. We're also talking about an unexplored era of major conflicts with nuclear powers. Things might "end" a little more emphatically than we want.
Depends on the alternative. There are some plausible futures in the crystal ball where my answer would definitely be yes.
Uh... welcome to globalization and industrialization? Industrial with strong global trade tend to be more war-averse; this has nothing to do with the so-called Pax Americana.
It would, in fact, have been pretty believable. Also, you know, manifest destiny. America has been a land and money-hungry empire from the very beginning.
Which it does. The violent turmoil is of course bad, but it can (and in many places, did) get better. The state of backwards stagnation enforced by European colonizers wasn't much better, if at all. Living in a state of debased slavery to foreign powers with no right to even hope for a better future was worse than any war, which is why many former colonies in fact violently liberated themselves. And that's before you get into violent atrocities. The people involved all seem to have preferred war over a deeply unjust peace.
Which was far less intrusive than the European version, so it was an improvement.
The Western Roman collapse where measures indicated that kids finally started getting enough to eat, yes.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire
Nuclear powers can manage (and for the most part are managing) their own business.
Well you have no idea, that's the whole point. If you were an Indian whose country had been turned into one massive scale plantation, and whose only choice seemed to be independence or a continuation of that state of economic slavery, would you have chosen independence or not?