From Britain and the USSR to Trump’s America, the cost of imperial expansion raises a lasting question: Can great nations be secure without it?
An empire is perhaps the most expensive indulgence that even the most powerful nations can afford only for a limited time. Arguments that empires are profitable are largely unconvincing and while they may enrich a narrow section of the elite, and perhaps do so spectacularly, it’s rarely for very long, and for everyone else, empire eventually means costs.
Consider the lives of ordinary people in 19th-century Britain, the colonial veteran portrayed by Rudyard Kipling, or the Russian village during the period of the Soviet Union’s greatest geopolitical power, as depicted by Russia’s remarkable “village prose” writers. Imperial grandeur didn’t necessarily translate into prosperity for those expected to sustain it, and eventually, the costs become impossible to ignore.
The ruling class begins to understand that the people fighting its wars may one day turn their bayonets against those who sent them, and this broadly speaking is what happened in the Soviet Union, although Britain, and to a lesser extent France, managed the retreat from empire more successfully in the second half of the 20th century.
But this leaves the fundamental question of how great powers can guarantee their security without absorbing potentially unstable neighbors into expensive imperial structures?
One of the paradoxes of international relations is that the more resources a state possesses, be they economic or demographic, the less it needs constant confrontation because the powerful can often obtain what they want with kind words rather than a gun.
