Dubya & Co. think what the world needs now is a war, sweet war, but empires ain’t what they used to be, the Cato Institute’s Ivan Eland says. He writes:

The strategy of empire is likely to overstretch and bleed America’s economy and its military and federal budgets, and the overextension could hasten the decline of the United States as a superpower, as it did the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The strategy could also have the opposite effect from what its proponents claim it would have; that is, it would alarm other nations and peoples and thus provoke counter-balancing behavior and create incentives for other nations to acquire weapons of mass destruction as an insurance policy against American military might.

See his full analysis here. Also posted to Stand Down.