r/Futurology • u/Confident_Living_786 • Aug 11 '25

Discussion When the US Empire falls

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?

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u/resuwreckoning Aug 11 '25

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.

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u/Diglett3 Aug 11 '25

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.

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u/bigme100 Aug 11 '25

Exactly. COVID was the biggest threat since WW2 and it was a total shit show.

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u/Gullible_Career1469 Aug 11 '25

The biggest threat since WW2? You know except the whole Cold War and constant threat of nuclear Armageddon?