All empires fall, eventually.”
“But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.”
---Max Barry
I was in Boston recently and did the tourist thing. We did the tour with the Boston Tea Party Museum. Among the things I learned was the indifference to the American sentiments which led to the lost of America as a British Colony. The revolt was over the army that was sent over from Britain and the taxes that were levied against British merchandise. Since East India Company, whose tea was dumped into the harbor, had a monopoly over the American trade, the British could easily have asked the East India Company to include the taxes as part of the price of the Tea and no one would be the wiser. It might have delay the end of the British Empire. The East India Company itself, despite hugely profitable trades across the world, almost went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the British government. The reason was that it had also taken on the task of empire building. In 1857, it had an army 280,000 strong. Eventually, the cost of running this empire was untenable and East India Company was taken over by the government. As with the East India Company, the British Empire, whose rise was driven internally with the Industrial revolution, Eventually fall as the cost of running the empire exceeded the benefit. The timing of their fall was due to the rise of the United States as the rising power. It was the United States, wanting to overtake the British as the superpower after World War II, that encouraged British colonies all over the world to secede from Britain, thus raising the cost of the empire until it exceeded the British's capacity to maintain it.
The end of the cold war left the United States with NATO, bases and alliances all over the world and a trading alliance with the most prosperous nations in the world. The U.S. was set up to rule the world. Unfortunately, like all empires before us, our victory over the Soviet Union had driven us to hubris and overreach. After 911, George W. Bush started the war with Iraq to control the Middle East, and by extension, to control the world. Instead, the electoral democracy that he installed in Iraq had created the Shiite Crescent, a rising power in the Middle East that gave rise to a lot of conflicts. Compared to Iraq, China is many order of magnitude larger, stronger and smarter. Unlike us, the Chinese also have an expectation that is grounded in reality. They don't want to rule the world. For now, they wanted to control their immediate neighborhood and they wanted to trade with the rest of the world based on common interests between them and other nations. In the mean time, with the lost of the Soviet Union and with Russia a shadow of its former self, NATO is no longer a cohesive unit like during the cold war. The United States, treating the Europeans like our own fiefdom, had made demands to them that are against their own interests. We had ask that they stop the Nordstream pipeline so we can cut off the oil revenue of Russia. We had ask that they stop using Huawei for their 5G network. We discouraged them from joining the Chinese Belts and Roads initiative. At the end, the Europeans balked at all these demands and went their own way. Germany is signalling that they will allow Huawei for their 5G. Italy, financially wobbly, has announced that they will join the Belts and Roads initiative. At the end of the day, unrealistic expectations meant, at a minimum, the lost of credibility. It also increased the cost of running an empire unnecessarily.
The rise of each empire is driven by internal factors, factors like good governance, high population IQ, scale of the country and the character of the people. The empire falls if the cost of running the empire exceed the benefit. In the case of the United States, if our empire fall, it would most likely be due to our overreach. With the rise of China, our cost of maintaining world order could become prohibitive if we have the wrong expectations and wanted to exert complete control in every corner of the world. Instead, we should very carefully weigh the cost and benefit to our nation each time we contemplate taking an action. We must not let our dominance blind us to our limitations.
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