To Adebayo:

Apologies for the length.

Toynbee's Civilization has a great chapter or two on the fall of empires.

Some empires collapse in a short period of time, others take longer, but fall they will.

Entropy affects all.

Here's a few quotes from another source:

"Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, long-term decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune."

Conquering Caesars return as heroes to claim the thrones. Booty and loot and other forms of homage and taxation pours into the new empire.

Think slaves and cheap labour too.

And dynasties are formed.

But this means a bureaucracy.

And the graft and nepotism and corruption that follows.

Troops need to be stationed in the new increasingly far-flung reaches of the empire.

More need for quartermasters. And graft and corruption and greed.

BUT, the children of the 'Conquering Caesar's' do not always want to take the risks of military paths...why, one could end up dead.

Think: Eisenhower's and MacArthur's children and even National Guard's George Bush, Jr. , to say nothing about Trump.

Money was leaving the capital cities but NOT always reaching the troops, everyone was taking a piece of the pie: Pentagon anyone?

Toynbee wrote that the empire had one last gasp of military expansionism. Think Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then the great unraveling begins.

Other empires are banging at the gates, slathering for their turns at supremacy.

The elites become content to hide behind their gated communities both within and without the empire.

After all, they often have garnered 80% plus of the Empire's wealth. During the French Revolution, the division of wealth was 90% held by 10% of the population.

The USA you might ask?

Overall, the top 10% richest own more than the bottom 90% combined, with $95 trillion in wealth.

And so one must keep the Barbarians as well as the 'great unwashed' at bay, so they hire their own militias or security guards to protect their wealth.

And bang the drum of militaristic nationalism and offer a way out of poverty to the children of the poor.

Ergo, such wealth is further enriched by a war machine.

They rob the civilian infrastructure to pay for the military.

And schools, and roads and hospitals and sanitary conditions fall into disrepair.

And for those whose piteous share of the wealth means abject poverty?

With no hope, many become more and more desperate, they will turn to supernatural Providence, think The Rapture, or find themselves willing to betray the empire.

Think civil war and revolutions and Chinese infiltration: imagine China's Young Thousand Talents Program' and the infiltration of the West's best universities and the pilfering of technology, germ warfare and intellectual property.

But even worse?

Add perhaps the greatest threat to empires?

Climate change.

Think of the cataclysmic acts of vulcanism during 'The Great Winter of 536 C.E'. and the famines and plagues that followed to essentially exacerbate the destruction of what was left of the two Roman Empires.

So, other than the absolute current inanity of threatening to unleash nuclear winters to protect the crumbling vestiges of the empires, we are not doing our best to stop the US decline.

The pity is that US think tanks, talk about an oxymoron, have studied Toynbee and Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's The Art of War and know the formula.

But they seem paralyzed by their elites, and their pompous displays of wealth and narcissistic need for attention, and so their crippling hold on the reigns of power remains unabated...and will bring about the very same disastrous results.

Entropy affects us all.