The "American Empire" ended with the Philippines' independence in 1946. It's easy to proclaim the demise of something that never actualy existed. The claim is a

The "American Empire" ended with the Philippines' independence in 1946. It's easy to proclaim the demise of something that never actualy existed. The claim is always that America had this vast empire by using its power to influence the word economy and other countries decisions. But that isn't an empire. The evidence is that when these countries become more developed the "empire" immediately "collapses." So was that an empire? Certainly not a classical case of an empire. It seems like these people want there to have been an American Empire just so that they can say it collapsed. On Rome, the issue of Rome wasn't that Romans were poor, far from it. The source of the Roman Emperor's power was by feeding Egyption wheat to the Romans.[0] If the author is looking for a cause to the fall of Rome, one explaination is that the people chose to exchange thier freedom for government subsidized food. They pretended that the Princeps ("first among the equals") had thier intrests in mind, while the system slowly eroded an collapsed over the course of 500 years. Over that time, the traditional Roman ethic of responsibilty, the one that made them reject Monarchy, was replaced by neglect and indifference. This said, boiling down the fall of the Roman Empire to one dimension is foolish anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae