We Can No Longer Afford the Empire

Ivan Eland points out that while the financial meltdown makes bringing the troops back home critical, the signs of imperial overstretch have been obvious for some time. With only 20 percent of the world's GDP, the DC empire accounts for 43 percent of the world's military spending. Numbers like that should open our eyes to our warped priorities and the impossibility of propping them up much longer, but the historical record suggests our leaders don't want to see what's happening:

The bad news is that most waning empires – for example, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union – don't realize that they are declining until it is too late. For example, the French futilely tried to reassert control in Indochina after World War II and failed in bitterly opposing Algeria's independence using armed force; the British, along with the French and Israelis, conducted an ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1956; and the Soviets became mired in a losing counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The U.S. may very well now be in similar circumstances.

So which will it be, a soft landing or a hard one? Do we peacefully devolve into manageable political units, or are we condemned to try to rebuild from ashes?