Rath said:
No the British Empire in its heyday was more influential than the USA is today. At the end of the Napoleonic wars Britain was a mono-polar superpower of a far greater extent than the USA is a superpower today, indeed the USA has only had (and will only have) about twenty years of being the sole super-power as both China and the European Union are currently rising to be at least economic super-powers. Also the USA is unlikely to have the same kind of graceful fall that Britain had. The USA has never been an empire, Britains fall was that of a gradually eroding empire - with its edges wearing away until only the heart was left. The USA doesn't have edges to wear.
On topic however, this could be good news for Japan. There is almost no denying that the LDP had become ridiculously stagant - a spell in opposition will give them opportunity to refresh and reposition for the next election. |
), nor has a nation had the economic dominance in comparison to the rest of the world. The 1800 great powers were never superpowers.I disagree about the influence, most of what the British Empire did only influenced the countries inside the empire, which at peak, was around 25% of the globe - most of the empire was based on coastal countries as well due to the fact that most of its military dominance lied in the Royal Navy. American influence spreads to all four corners of the globe, and, for the most part, is optional - lots of nations let America "in" so to speak because it generally benefits them in a good way (particularly in the Western world) - which is why I believe the fall will be graceful, as it will be slowly replaced by nations turning to BRIC economies and EU over the space of decades, rather then being ended rather abruptly like the German Empires and Imperial Japan.
