The Brittish empire was a vanity project. The Brits had a couple of fun centuries. But the empire was always a net loss. The reason the empire fell apart was because Great Britain couldn't afford it anymore, (because of the the cost of winning the world wars).
USA is in a similar position. It's now the world's greatest superpower. But there's less benefit to the US economy than the cost of swinging around it's large penis. It's a vanity project. Ie, Americans get to have the lovely feeling of creating world peace, and getting to feel being the saviour of the world. That's the transaction. But there's little economic benefit to USA from it. There's a little. But nowhere near what it costs.
I agree, ruling the world is not particularly profitable. But I am bemused as to why you think it
should be, and why you imagine that economic benefit is the only kind of benefit worth having.
Everyone seems to have become crazy economic rationalists, who demand that everything must either be profitable or be discarded. This is inhuman.
I'll quote Margaret Thatcher, "the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money".
If something isn't profitable it's unsustainable. In a free market economy with competing nations, any actor who isn't laser focused on economic sustainability (which also is environmental sustainability) will eventually become dominated by those who are. There's a current pattern around the world where small countries tend to have liberal economic laws and a society continually updating and improving it's support for it's companies. The tiny Nordic countries are excellent examples. Why are these so good at optimising it's economic policies? Because we have to or we'd be fucked. Any slip up and we'll be sucked into Germanies economic dominance and we'd render ourselves irrelevant.
To sum up, if your world domination isn't profitable you will, eventually, stop being dominant. And whoever focused on profit will instead dominate the world. I'd rather it wasn't China. So I think the West (or rather democratic nations of the world should get our act together and focus on economic sustainability.
What is the value of being rich, if you live like a penniless bum because you hoard your money and only spend it on absolute necessities, and invest the rest toward the sole objective of getting richer still?
Sure. Life is more fun if we're short-sighted and don't care about the future of the world or our nations. Life is short and all that. I just think that investing in our future prosperity is worth it.
The British imperials of the C19th understood this; They wanted to turn a profit, but never at the expense of making things drab and utilitarian. When London needed a way to pump shit into the Thames estuary and away from the city, they didn't build this:
It's because the London sewage system was made from cast iron. There's very little extra cost to make cast iron decorative. But once we started making stuff out of welded steel plates, girders and concrete then making it decorative becomes prohibitively expensive.
Cast iron needs to be painted or it'll rust. Painting it in decorative colours and patterns is not much more expensive than in boring colours. I think red was the cheapest colour to paint. Followed by green. Stainless steel does not need to be painted.
They built this:
...and the world was a better place for it.
It made no economic sense. Bjt then, tbe idea that economic sense is the only sense, or the only sense worth having, makes no sense at all.
The reason Great Britain created their empire was because they wanted to ensure the UK factories had continued access to the natural resources their factories needed. They were worried other imperial nations would use monopolies as leverage to blackmail the UK out of stuff. Which the UK took advantage of, as often as they could. The historian Dominic Sandbrook aptly called Great Britain the Putin of the 19'th century.
After WW1 all the imperial nations simply agreed they wouldn't limit eachothers access to resources, which killed the need for continual expansion of empires. So they stopped. Germany and Italy just didn't get that memo.
After WW2 and the world agreed on the UN and open and free markets everywhere there was absolutely no need to have empires at all. Which is why the British empire just evaporated in the 1950'ies and 1960'ies. It was way cheaper to just buy the same products from their former colonies than it was to run the colonies.
Trump's tariffs is an attempt to turn the clock back to before the world wars. But, you may have noticed that other countries aren't hitting eachother with tariffs. So it's just stupid. All Trump is doing with his tariffs and agressive expansion plans is to give the rest of the world incentives to ally against USA. Which, btw, is already happening.
So yeah... empires are dead. It's an old way of seeing the world.
