alt Hacker News> I think the whole “empire collapsing” is a bit of a dramatized phrasing, though historians can correct me. I think it’s much more death by a thousand cuts, and the UK is a great analogue in that regard.
Didn't the UK's empire notably collapse quite rapidly?
Did the US? I would argue it’s been going on for 80 years, in tandem with the rise of the military industrial complex. Go back much further than that, though, and the argument starts leaking into whether the US was ever great to begin with (assuming “great” = “empire”, loosely).
But the US was never really an empire in the traditional sense, no? More of a cultural hegemon / terrorist petrostate.