Not really. I mean, you wouldn't have an empire in the first place unless you sent your troops to foreign lands, right? Arguing that the Roman empire fell it didn't keep its armies in Latium kind of misses the point.
I would argue that most empires fell because the values that gave them the strength to build the empire withered away when life got too easy with imperial wealth.
The people got soft, so the empire fell. That's the far more common story. That's at least if we're talking about the classic definition of an empire - one that lasts more than just a decade or two.
“The people got soft, so the empire fell.”
Not an expert, but I THINK this is an old myth started by Edward Gibbon in his classic work on the Roman Empire. Gibbon was not a modern historiographer and didn’t understand how much his ideas were influenced by the politics of England in the 1780s.
If you have read the History of the Peloponnesian War you know the Athenian Empire didn’t fall because the Athenians got soft. They understood what courage was and they had it in spades.
Then too, describing American hegemony as empire is going way too far, I think. Did we take Iraq’s land and convert the inhabitants to Christianity? Not even close. Are we making the Europeans pay tribute? Not even slightly - quite the reverse, actually. We’re overinvesting in our military, and allowing them to underinvest, because “we” (someone, god knows who) have decided that the political advantages outweigh the financial disadvantages. Whether they do or not is a different question.
Ah, it’s all too complicated for me...
The main point is overextending resources of empire.
The mighty Mughal empire whose capital was in Delhi. OKAY, Their armies did not go to foreign land. But India is a big country. The empire sent their armies to the south to conquer all of India. That was the beginning of end. The hit and run strategy used by Maratha warlord Shivaji in the south was able to defeat the bigger Mughal armies away from the capital.