>>21
What part of the US is an "empire?" Every country we've gone to war with since--I'm not not sure how far to slide back but I'm thinking some time after Roosevelt's absurd Latin American "roundup," who hasn't kicked our asses (I'm looking at you, Vietnam), has not become an outlying satellite of the United States. We've angered more of those nations that we've built than not since then and any repercussions have been mild. There's even a great push to recede the size and scope of central government and make a realistic jump back towards a republic.
If you want to compare the Roman Empire to the United States, you would need to say that the destruction of that Empire to us would be a return to a republic. The Roman Empire's age of decline isn't considered to have begun until the initial intentional division that created the Eastern Roman Empire and the Southern Roman Empire. Splitting the military down this divide was what really broke the Empire because it left it have difficulties facing against the Germanic tribes and they broke against everyone else. I don't argue that this thin spread of the US forces doesn't exist in the world today, but the part that isn't correct is to say that is what killed the Roman military. The Roman military was
defeated in a number of its thinly-spread skirmishes and that weakened its defense; the US army has shown itself to be able to hold its own even in such a scattered environment. Secondly, succession rules of the Emperor broke down and subsequent Emperors were merely figureheads. The Roman Senate was never appointed by or answerable to the people, save a lynching. More importantly, the Roman Empire had undergone incredible physical expansion prior to these problems leading to these problems; the United States hasn't gained new territory since Hawaii. The parallels can be drawn but the specifics don't exist.
I don't know enough about the former Soviet Union to draw any conclusions but I am affected by the specific interpretation that there was no dissolution. Just handshakes and changing the signpost to say "Russia, publicly."