alt Hacker NewsI don't think you addressed my main point about ecosystems.
Following your argument, every major power could be considered imperialistic, which kind of defeats the purpose of the word. Aye the US maintains some minor, vestigial, colonies. However it does not engage in imperial conquest. South Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not part of US territorial holdings, and it was never a US war objectives to make them so.
We have to draw some lines somewhere, otherwise "imperialist" just means "really big". If you disagree, name a non-imperialist world power.
At no point in this thread have I claimed there are no other countries with imperialist characteristics, I'm just highlighting the fact that the US is very much an empire, an empire which runs my country and many more besides, and is very much the biggest and baddest of them all today.
Territorial conquest here is very much a legal, not a practical distinction. To return to my previous point, different empires function differently. I don't think absorption into one's de-jure territory is is necessarily a defining characteristic here. Much of India under the British, for example, was run through vassals.
To address your question directly, I'd say India is a major world power, with about four times the population of the US, and you'd be hard pressed to describe them as an empire.
China, for its part, maintains three overseas bases, only one of which in a country it has sent troops into during a conflict (Cambodia). This is in comparison to over fifty US bases, the largest of which are all very much the result of invasions.
In the 21st century, China has had a few border skirmishes with India. In the 21st century alone, the US has fought in Afghanistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Uganda, DRC, CAR, South Sudan, Niger, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuala, and Nigeria.
If you want to pin me down on a definition, I'd say an empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threat of force.
How would you define one?