> there is no substantial definition of "empire" by which the U.S. is an empire I'm genuinely curious about your take on that. I've had the assumption that th

> there is no substantial definition of "empire" by which the U.S. is an empire I'm genuinely curious about your take on that. I've had the assumption that the U.S. control over so much of the world's economics and security amounts to running an empire - stuff like exporting inflation via the worlds reserve currency and selling treasury bonds (modern tribute), worldwide control over trade using a navy with more tonnage than all of our enemies combined, military bases in 80 countries, things like the Monroe Doctrine enforcing our interests over an entire continent, decades of using the CIA and other means to replace governments in other countries that we don't like, wars in the past to secure our supply of oil, funding proxy wars to destabilize up and coming regional powers, exporting our drug and copyright laws to the rest of the world, running the worlds financial networks, restricting trade in territories we control like Puerto Rico, exported our culture to the rest of the world, etc. For decades we seem to have dominated a large swath of the world in ways that other western countries, like Canada for example, do not. There's even a long Wikipedia article on American Imperialism [0]. Does the definition of empire preclude the idea of modern empires not following the same methods of past empires? Or am I missing something else? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism