I’m not teasing you, just trying to understand: if you criticize the anglo-ameri

I’m not teasing you, just trying to understand: if you criticize the anglo-american empire, and I criticize the russian and chinese empires, and the french attempt to turn europe into her empire, and germany’s failure to counterbalance and function as the core state of the federation of Europe, these are not obviously different arguments.
I mean, I’m clearly missing something.
Part of it is that I understand empires are extensions of manor houses > feudal systems > city states > alliances of city states > states > federations > empires as means of reducing costs of the frictions of defense, trade, cooperation and strategic preservation.
My concern is that empires fail for the same reason as do all states, city states, and feuds and manors: the incentives of corruption at the top suppress the individual aspirations of the rest until the corruption speads and the cooperation necessary for preservation whether institutional or normative, fails in the face of competition, war, or shocks.
So we could take the position that all civilizations no matter their composition go thru cycles of expansion in service of cooperation, separation in service of comparative advantage, and collapse in service of corruption.