General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat would a declining American empire mean to an average American citizen?
Higher prices for imported goods?
Higher inflation? Other?
bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)L. Coyote
(51,129 posts)leftstreet
(36,119 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)MissB
(15,813 posts)Dark Angel, circa 2000 with Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly? It'd be like that, minus the genetically altered kids.
GeorgeGist
(25,326 posts)HeartachesNhangovers
(816 posts)Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands? Am I forgetting any of our vast empire?
hatrack
(59,602 posts)HeartachesNhangovers
(816 posts)the consent of the foreign country? If so, that doesn't count as an empire.
hatrack
(59,602 posts)Tens of thousands of people have demanded an end to the United States' military presence on the Japanese island of Okinawa following the killing of a local woman.
Kenneth Franklin Shinzato, a 32-year-old civilian worker who was stationed at the U.S. Kadena Air Base, was last month arrested on suspicion of murdering the 20 year old and abandoning her body.
In an emotional letter read out during a march on the island Sunday, the victim's father said, for the local people's protection, all United States military bases on Japan's Okinawa prefecture had to go.
EDIT
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/20/asia/us-military-base-protests-okinawa/index.html
This has been going on for decades, btw - rapes, murders, drunk driving fatalities by US personnel or contractors.
In the 1970s, British officials ordered that Chagossian dogs be rounded up. They were then gassed to death. Then they shipped the Chagossian people more than a thousand miles away to Mauritius, a former British colony, where the people lived in abject poverty.
Declassified messages between the British and U.S. governments show a plot to wipe all human life off the islands to make way for the U.S. military base.
"There will be no indigenous population except seagulls," says one cable from 1966. "Unfortunately, along with those birds go some few Tarzans," says another.
"It was a secret deal done between two governments, which resulted in islanders being hoodwinked out of their homes and from their islands," says Jeremy Corbyn, a member of Britain's Parliament who has worked on this issue for decades. "They have sought ever since their right of return."
EDIT
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/04/16/399845336/hope-builds-for-islanders-displaced-in-shameful-chapter-of-u-k-history
Or you can just remove entire populations . . .
Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature US base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But dont for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.
Unknown to most Americans, Washingtons garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls lily pads (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.
Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australias tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.
As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, avoidance of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. To project its power, he says, the United States wants secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located around the world. According to some of the strategys strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be to create a worldwide network of frontier forts, with the US military the global cavalry of the twenty-first century.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/pentagon-new-generation-military-bases-tom-dispatch/
But don't call it an "empire", whatever you do . . .