I'd like to point out something completely new in today's world, which is likely to bring new dynamics to all the "empire" discussions - the fact that today's Western world is highly
leveraged . Our economies do not work on brute force, brute labor, smple gestures - it's instead a highly choreographed, extremely organised, perpetually going forward exercise in balance. It's like at the circus, when you see a 5-person high column of gymnasts and you marvel at the little boy or girl at the very top standing on one leg while juggling 3 balls - and you forget about the efforts of the 4 gymnasts below. It's very spectacular, genuinely better (as a show) that one guy juggling, and it's a real "win-win" situation: the whole groups is seen as marvelous, even if the competence of the bottom guys is only to be strong, and of the middle ones only to be steady. There still is only one juggler, but through cooperation and a common purpose, the whole group is at a higher state of performance.
This higher "performance", in our world, has been made possible ONLY because we have abandoned "might is right" as a functioning principle and decided to used better tools, such as predictable rules, consistently and evenly applied, specialisation and the trust that totally unknown people will follow the same rules of behavior as you do which such specialisation requires, curiosity, openness, a willingness to accept failure and learn from our mistakes. Of course, this is an idealised description, but it still basically fits our world.
Think about it. Do you worry about how to feed yourself, how to repair your car, about the reality of your wealth although it is only dots of ink on pieces of paper or blinking lights on a screen? This is leverage. This is our world.
One aspect of this world of ours is that we have become responsible, in a strange way, for the situation of "non-leveraged" people around the world. Their "nonleveragedness" is an obstacle to our own "leveragedness" (they don't care about the things we do, they have nothing much to lose in the monetary terms we use and are thus less afraid to break things that have monetary value as we are - they don't care about being efficient, they don't care about joining the rat race - and yet our world is accessible to them and thus susceptible to be acted upon by them) and we must thus change them. In simpler terms, to get richer, we have to make them richer (whether they want it or not) because being so poor they are a danger to us (and this is not incompatible with us having exploited and still exploiting them in many ways - we don't have to make them rich - only richer).
This gets us back to the discussion about our current empire - to maintain our way of life, this neverending quest for efficiency and monetarily measurable wealth, we need to get them to adopt our ways as well,
if necessary by force. This use of force is totally at odds with the internal mechanics of the system; leverage requires trust, conviction, openness. Force negates these.
This contradiction is hard to square. The "smart" way to make leverage move forward is to convince people yet out of it that it is worth joining the rat race - this is essentially the European Union's approach - it offers the temptation of economic prosperity to lure countries to what is effectively a corset of institutions, rules, bureaucracy that makes the rat race/wealth creation possible. It also used to be the American approach. The new US attitude to the world (we only care about us - we don't need you in our system - if you are too stupid not to see how great it is, you deserve whatever you will get from us for being in our way) is very dangerous because it forgets that a highly leveraged system is VERY vulnerable to guerilla tactics, terrorism and in general any kind of win-lose or even lose-lose tactic - one side has so much more to lose.
Anyway, I don't know if this all makes sense, but my point is basically that when you're hanging on top of 5 guys juggling, you should not try to start throwing your balls to the tomato-holding guy in the crowd who has just booed you...
