Reply #10: The Empire has entered the phase of decline.

[Spider Jerusalem]

It happened to the Romans, it happened to the British. Now it's happening to the United States. The wheel of history turns, and the same spoke keeps coming up. The US learned from the British, and did it better; where did you think our industry and capitalism came from? British industry was, once upon a time, the envy of the world; Great Britain was "the world's workshop", Sheffield steel and the ships and guns it built extended the British reach to encompass one-quarter of the globe in the nineteenth century. Ruinous wars and economic competition from upstarts like Germany and America broke the Empire.

Our Empire was built on commerce, like our great predecessor in the peak-seat of global power; and, like them, in the decline of our industry and the weakening of our powers we try to reassert our tenuous control through the ill-considered use of an overextended military to fight ultimately unwinnable wars in far-off and hostile lands, whilst our factories are idled, our treasury emptied and the burdens of maintaining the imperial façade drown us in ruinous and unsustainable debt.

This was inevitable; nothing lasts forever.