One way empires have dealt with that kind of problen is to employ other people to do the fighting. The number of British troops in India was only a fraction of the Indian Army. The proportion of actual Romans in the legions kept on reducing till they ceased to be Roman in any sense except the crucial ones of armaments and tactics

I hope you're right, Strick, and that it won't pan out the Imperial America route. The trouble is, the situation we're in now is radically different from any that's existed previously. The whole world is in a sense in the palm of a single superpower, and the superpower appears to be in the hands of some dangerously deluded people with a remarkably effective privatised propaganda machine acting on their behalf.

And against that hope has to rest on the possibility that enough ordonary Americans will see through the propaganda, and effect regime change in their own country.