re: #289 Belafon

And our collapse is due to the fact that we haven’t played the typical Empire - we don’t require other countries to pay for our military nor are they required to treat us as first among equals (that doesn’t mean countries don’t for obvious reasons) - and Trump has been trying to change the arrangement to an extortion racket.

Like all analogies mine fail in the details; history only stutters; but I’m firmly convinced that the world of, say, 2050 will be “bigly” different from what we see today.