“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...
Americans benefit from high paying military industrial complex jobs.
Spell out the benefits to majority of Americans in the lower 90% earning bracket from spending Trillions of BORROWED money in (Iraq+Afghanistan+Vietnam and other sundry places). Would that money have been better spent in building American infrastructure, subsidizing STEM education, and strengthen social security & Medicare?