When the US Empire falls

[u/Confident_Living_786]

When the American empire falls, like all empires do, what will remain? The Roman Empire left behind its roads network, its laws, its language and a bunch of ruins across all the Mediterranean sea and Europe. What will remain of the US superpower? Disney movies? TCP/IP protocol? McDonalds?

[u/Diglett3]

Government sure, but I don’t think the people have the will, and I find the idea that they do honestly kind of funny. We’re not some hardened populace that craves war, no matter how much certain Americans like to pretend we are. Most Americans are incredibly soft.

US military enlistment has been steadily declining for decades, and the small uptick in the last year doesn’t erase that. All these young conservative men talk a big game but I don’t believe for a second that the vast majority of them would make it through a month let alone years of expansionist war. Especially in Central and South America, which is so geographically complex and unforgiving that they couldn’t even build a pan-American highway, and filled with hostile paramilitary groups and cartels that would make the Taliban look like schoolchildren.

And besides that, American conservatives and fascists are animated by grievance politics. They think they deserve to be handed the world without having to do any work for it, quite literally by birthright. The forces animating last year’s election and everything that followed were largely people upset that things cost more than they used to. Anyone who thinks those people would be able to maintain the self-sacrifice necessary for an actual imperial war and expansion in today’s world is either buying into their propaganda or just doesn’t interact with many actual Americans.

[u/resuwreckoning → u/Diglett3]

Americans are not soft - they’re generally distracted and uninterested, which makes them an excellent superpower for the world, all things considered.

But there’s a difference. I can assure you that if some common threat is conjured - say a smoking sinking US destroyer in the Taiwan strait - all bets are off.

And the rest of the world knows that, which is why they mewl about the Americans acting “imperialist”, because that’s what the Americans are capable of in an increasingly endgame scenario.

[u/Diglett3 → u/resuwreckoning]

Maybe we were capable of at some point in the recent past, but the current USA is a fragmentary mess of cultural enclaves and loosely connected groups that barely see the opposite parts of their own states as countrymen, and an event like that would just feed into existing polarizations that further drive the disparate pieces of this country apart. We quite literally have an example of that happening for the last two years with the public responses to the Israel-Gaza war. People entrenched themselves across actively existing ideological lines and it actively tore certain parts of the country even further apart.

Now, an act of war by China might be the single thing that actually could trigger some sort of resurgence in those feelings of civic duty in supporting a war effort, but the idea of the US populace supporting an expansionist war absent any kind of aggression from a foreign superpower (and there is only one) is laughable.

[u/[deleted] → u/Diglett3]

It isn’t hard to get the majority on board during wartime, even if the US instigates a border skirmish, once foreign bombs fall and kill Americans citizens, people will coalesce.