> The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire

Yeah, and look how that ended.

In fact, its entirely apt cautionary tale because due to taxes and an ever increasing cost of living in Rome proper citizen-soldiers (during the Republic) often went bankrupt and fell into destitute while fighting campaigns from Rome's conquest and returned to see the oligarchy take their fields/land and displaced them further and further out of Rome.

This is the story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, direct descendants of Scipio Africanus (the illustrious Soldier and Savior of the Roman Republic) and the Land/Ag Plebeian reforms they achieved that cost them both their lives after several stints in Politics.

It got to a point that due to land consolidation that it was less expensive to buy the wheat from Egypt, have it transported by boat, and used (often slave labour) to bake the bread then it was to buy a loaf locally. My old History professor went on an amazing rant about this for an hour in one of my Roman History courses when we were discussing the true costs of Imperial Expansion and what is often swept under the rug as a footnote in History, she was old but still pissed because they didn't let her include it in her book.

The World now is ever more interconnected than ever, and one could argue why that is a horrible trade-off both for national security purposes but also for self-reliance reasons as we saw with the PPE shortage and the faulty equipment that came from China. But I fail to see how the West at least would abandon the critical supply chains they have developed in order for Society to function unless we have something like an asteroid collision. Even now the EU as well as Australia, and New Zealand are siding with the US' stance on punishing the CCP's Security Law in Hong Kong that is going to undo the relationship that served as an access point into China via a neutral party.

Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages? Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement.

I think the US is headed for the same fate as Rome as it refuses to learn the same lessons, but if given the choice between China or the US as the Global Superpower I think its the latter that must retain its position as the former is hellbent on a suicidal mission that destroys everything in its path and will commit horrible acts of barbarism and won't hesitate to take the whole World down with it in its folly (see recent cases: Xianjing, Wuhan, Hong Kong and Beijing).

I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model as COVID has proven we cannot really overcome such huge issues like pandemics (or likely wide scale famines or global catastrophes) at such a scale. I mean governing 300+ million People is hard to conceptualize, but with Nation-States like China and India where it goes into the billions is just unfathomable and failure is the only real outcome in that.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI1VOOoey0