[Zhang Fei]

[Britain has foreign entanglements that force it to take Russia and China seriously as threats, plus as an island nation we depend very heavily on the sea for raw materials to fuel our economy.]

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The morons running US foreign policy in the immediate postwar period pretty much forced the European colonial powers to exit their hard-won conquests around the world. We are now literally paying for it with defense budgets as a % of GDP that are quadruple what they were pre-WWII, and hit a peak of 12% during the Cold War, because two of the five permanent members of the UN, China and Russia, are the same world-conquering empires they’ve always been, whereas Britain and France are no longer pulling their military weight, since they no longer have empires to defend. Eisenhower may have been a great peacemaker as SCAEF, but his Suez decision cost US dearly and continues to cost US today.

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

Russia’s gdp is less than Italy’s, both Britain and France could utterly outclass Russia militarily if we were willing to pay the same percent of gdp that the Russians do. Its kind of ridiculous Russia has as much geopolitical power as it does when it is economically speaking, a minnow on the world stage.

As for Empire, I think the writing was on the wall regardless of what the Americans did. Britain and France were both exhausted from the war effort and pro-independence movements were gathering strength, now aided by the communists in Russia. Decolonisation was inevitable. In the case of the British Empire this was the long term plan anyway, once each colony had reached the stage were it was considered to be ready for ‘responsible’ self government.