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Rome didn't just collapse, it was sacked. The US is incapable of suffering a fall of Rome. America's geography makes that impossible. At the very worse you woul

Rome didn't just collapse, it was sacked. The US is incapable of suffering a fall of Rome. America's geography makes that impossible. At the very worse you would see a return to a more insular America like it was before WW1. But even without American hegemony, the nation would still be a major power being the world's largest oil producer, the world's largest agricultural producer, and the world's largest consumer economy. The problem with any loss of American power is that potential great powers that could replace it, such as China, are deathly reliant on American lead order. China is neither energy nor food secure. How will they manage when their shipping isn't defended by the USN? How will they manage when climate change strains available resources? Especially when they are so geographically isolated from potential sources of those resources, and rivals are closer to those resources.

_iyig 6y ago
>The US is incapable of suffering a fall of Rome. America's geography makes that impossible. That’s true if you look at America’s rivals on the world stage, i.e. Russia or China. But Rome wasn’t sacked by the Persians, or the Egyptians, or another Great Power of the time. It was sacked by tribal Gauls and migrating tribes of Visigoths.
- disown 6y ago
  By that time, the gauls and the visigoths had gotten to be a greater military force than the romans. A few hundred years of battle against the romans had allowed the germanic barbarians to organize and weaponize to parity and beyond. Not too long after, the huns arrived and proved to be even more powerful and that pretty much ended the roman empire. For the last decades, the romans were pretty much paying the germanic tribes and the huns to stay away from rome. Certainly the germanic tribes as a whole can be considered a local "great power" and the huns certainly qualify as a great power.

_iyig 6y ago

>The US is incapable of suffering a fall of Rome. America's geography makes that impossible. That’s true if you look at America’s rivals on the world stage, i.e. Russia or China. But Rome wasn’t sacked by the Persians, or the Egyptians, or another Great Power of the time. It was sacked by tribal Gauls and migrating tribes of Visigoths.

disown 6y ago
By that time, the gauls and the visigoths had gotten to be a greater military force than the romans. A few hundred years of battle against the romans had allowed the germanic barbarians to organize and weaponize to parity and beyond. Not too long after, the huns arrived and proved to be even more powerful and that pretty much ended the roman empire. For the last decades, the romans were pretty much paying the germanic tribes and the huns to stay away from rome. Certainly the germanic tribes as a whole can be considered a local "great power" and the huns certainly qualify as a great power.