>I don’t want to oversell this, but it’s pretty profound. It may end up being the first time an empire has ever been toppled from without by an enemy who actually understands and has rather quickly diagnosed how to exploit its internal contradictions/weaknesses, rather than having to wait for those contradictions to play themselves out.
I see some similarities to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth here, which had the liberum veto and which was pretty powerful. Foreign powers exploited the crap out of this procedure and used it to divide the country from within, which helped enable the Partitions.
Of course, militarily speaking, the US's position is much more secure than Poland's was, so I have a hard time imagining the loss of any of the 50 states (at least) as a result of any similar meddling.
Indeed! I think that’s a case where the empire was rather transparently weak, and it’s no surprise that it was thus relatively short lived.
In America’s case, we’ve already seen how different it looks. We’re a full-bore global superpower. It wasn’t necessarily guaranteed that the Russians and Chinese would figure out how to exploit our democracy. Their closed systems are so weak, their cynical authoritarianism so blatantly inward-looking and myopic, and even their recent track record (the USSR’s) of fatally misunderstanding the West, all would have pointed to continued failure. But they *have*. It didn’t even take them all that long!
>I don’t want to oversell this, but it’s pretty profound. It may end up being the first time an empire has ever been toppled from without by an enemy who actually understands and has rather quickly diagnosed how to exploit its internal contradictions/weaknesses, rather than having to wait for those contradictions to play themselves out.
I see some similarities to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth here, which had the liberum veto and which was pretty powerful. Foreign powers exploited the crap out of this procedure and used it to divide the country from within, which helped enable the Partitions.
Of course, militarily speaking, the US's position is much more secure than Poland's was, so I have a hard time imagining the loss of any of the 50 states (at least) as a result of any similar meddling.
Indeed! I think that’s a case where the empire was rather transparently weak, and it’s no surprise that it was thus relatively short lived.
In America’s case, we’ve already seen how different it looks. We’re a full-bore global superpower. It wasn’t necessarily guaranteed that the Russians and Chinese would figure out how to exploit our democracy. Their closed systems are so weak, their cynical authoritarianism so blatantly inward-looking and myopic, and even their recent track record (the USSR’s) of fatally misunderstanding the West, all would have pointed to continued failure. But they *have*. It didn’t even take them all that long!