The Empire Strikes Out
History, that unsentimental undertaker, has buried every empire that swaggered across the stage believing itself permanent. The corpses differ in costume, but the causes of death are tediously predictable. Empires rot internally long before their enemies bother to tap the door. The United States, that once-boisterous experiment in liberty, now lies half-conscious, slurring patriotic slogans while the monitors flatline one by one.
Mouldy academic types identify five reliable symptoms of imperial demise: fiscal ruin, political cannibalism, military overstretch, economic decomposition, and cultural rot. Let us examine the American specimen before the embalmers arrive, shall we?
First off, empires collapse when the ledger stops lying for them. Rome shaved its coinage like a drunk barber; the Byzantines watered the gold; the British mortgaged the furniture. The United States has refined the art: it spends money it doesn’t have on projects no one wants for purposes no one remembers.
The national debt now exceeds the nation’s entire output by a measly 120% (if you trust the data). Washington borrows money in order to pay interest on the money it previously borrowed, which is the financial equivalent of mopping the floor with a running hose. Politicians thunder about responsibility during election season and then sprint to the printing press like hungover gamblers racing to the pawn shop.
The empire’s balance sheet resembles the medical chart of a man who insists he is healthy, while nurses quietly wheel in the organ-transplant trolley. The inevitable end is not a debate; it’s mathematics dancing naked in the woods: the mystery is gone.
El segundo, healthy republics conduct politics like adults in a boardroom. Dying republics behave like lunatics in a knife fight with a nail file. America’s rulers, those professional thespians of virtue, now resemble rival mobs squabbling over a dwindling stash of fool’s gold. Congress has become a Punch and Judy show performed by people who cannot spell “republic,” even with cue cards.
Government shutdowns are threatened like bar-bets, impeachment has become a parlor game, and legislative sessions resemble a brawl over toilet paper in a pandemic. Every institution once held sacred now inspires only laughter, dread, or derision. Trust in government has sunk lower than the moral standards of a reality-show producer — and with significantly fewer laughs. The Kardashians are practically saints by comparison.
When a population no longer believes the game is honest, it ceases to play by the rules. Empires don’t fall from invasion; they fall when the governed stop pretending they are governed or governable.
Thirdly, every collapsing empire attempts to compensate for domestic decay with foreign adventures. Rome hired mercenaries to defend it from tribes it could have crushed a century earlier. Napoleon tore across Europe like a man sprinting for a toilet he would never reach. The United States now follows the script: bases everywhere, victories nowhere, objectives forgotten on takeaway napkins.
The military budget could fund the GDP of small nations, yet the country can’t fight a war without running out of ammunition, or recruiting ads begging teenagers more interested in TikTok choreography than trench warfare. Two decades in the Middle East ended in confusion and retreat, and the chief strategic outcome seems to be defense contractors acquiring larger yachts, while Venezuelan fishing boats quickly disappear.
A superpower that can’t win wars will eventually lose peace.
On the fourth hand, a thriving empire builds; a dying one consumes itself like a starving rat chewing its own leg. The United States once manufactured steel, automobiles, and Moon rockets. Now it manufactures influencers, compliance paperwork, and antidepressant prescriptions. The middle class — the backbone of any stable country — has been flayed and displayed like a frog in biology class.
Home-ownership, once the ordinary citizen’s rite of passage, now requires a down payment roughly equivalent to the ransom of a kidnapped billionaire. Real wages stagnate while the price of breathing in a major city doubles annually. The working class lines up for gig-jobs that pay less than the minimum wage in Victorian England, while the wealthy accumulate their fortunes through financial alchemy that would make Paracelsus blush.
When the middle can no longer remain upright, the empire collapses like a bad stage prop in the grade school play.
Omen the fifth, no empire survives after its people stop believing the story they once told themselves. America once possessed a roaring confidence: an unshakeable myth of liberty, frontier spirit, and invention. Now its culture resembles a therapy session conducted in a padded room when the Thorazine has worn off. Half the country despises the other half with a passion normally reserved for invading armies, and the national motto might as well be “Every furry for themself (watch those pronouns).”
Art has descended from aspiration to agitprop and recycled comic-book franchises. Films lecture rather than enchant. Public discourse resembles a shouting match among sleep-deprived Twinkie-fuelled toddlers. If culture is a civilization’s immune system, the United States now resembles a patient refusing antibiotics while insisting masks stop viruses and gangrene is stylish.
A civilization that cannot produce beauty, produces noise. At that point, stick a fork in it. We’re just arguing over who gets the crispy skin bits.
The American empire displays all five terminal signs simultaneously. Fiscal ruin. Political cannibalism. Military exhaustion. Economic collapse of the middle class. Cultural decomposition. These are not warning symptoms; they are the last rites. The undertaker is already warming the embalming fluid.
Collapses don’t unfurl in cinematic slow-motion. They happen like avalanches — a rumble, a crack, a few seconds of terror, then silence. The Soviet Union, that grim monolith of iron ideology, went from superpower to museum exhibit in under three years. Rome spent centuries rotting before barbarian taps toppled the edifice. America, with modern speed, will likely choose the Soviet timetable over the Roman.
Could the United States recover? Yes — theoretically. But recovery demands virtue, discipline, unity, sacrifice, and an adult population willing to confront reality. At present, none of those qualities are evident in any concentration measurable outside a laboratory’s atomic scale.
The empire is not dying — a headless chicken on the run — it’s already passed on and the “leaders” are rolling the corpse for loose change before scurrying off to their doomsday bunkers.
Emperor Xi, Darth Putin and Grand Moff Modi need only bide their time.
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There are so many great films on the collapse of empires. Talk about a dramatic background. I’m going with a couple of rather obscure, but excellent films that do justice to the cinematic arts. The first is The Last Valley (197), set in the 1600s, and depicting the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War. Michael Caine and Omar Serif turn in outstanding performances, and James Clavell (The Great Escape) creates a lush and detailed world for them. The double-feature is an outstanding Argentinian film called Zama (2017), also set in the 1600s, and dramatizing the collapse of the Spanish empire. Bon visionnage!
Source: Radio FarSide
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