Susan Kokinda

They had a very highly skilled sector which built and supported their military, but it was totally closed off from the rest of society.

And the rest of their civilian economy was just a complete disaster.

And it was kind of that tension, that collapse of the civilian economy, because the population, again, was in this kind of mind policing world where you're not allowed to think independently.

And if you do, you're going to be punished.

Ultimately, that's what's going to kill any society.

Now, with the fall of the Soviet Union,

And with putin's several presidencies, but especially this latest round they put enormous impact on education, science and technology, you know cultural expansion and so on, for the whole population and that's what's key you can't have a stratified society and be successful.

That's the ultimate failure of empires or any system, which is based on that kind of idea that we have the elites and then we have the peons.

Well, the question is, will there be any empires?

And that's up to us here in the United States.

If the Trump revolution succeeds and continues, which means one of his successors, J.D.

Vance, Marco Rubio, continues this, and we establish these principles, which are ensconced in the national security strategy, the national defense strategy, and everything, what all the

Trump people said when they went to Davos, we want a world of sovereign nations.

If the United States is able to play that role, which is what the British have been afraid of since certainly the time of Abraham Lincoln, but absolutely since the time of McKinley.

If the United States maintains itself as a sovereign, independent, prosperous nation, if other nations are allowed to replicate that,

and you have, as the president said so many times, a world of sovereign nations, then there won't be any empires.

And I think China will adopt to that.

Look, there's an older tradition in China.

I mentioned the countries that were advocates of the American system.

Chiang Kai-shek was an open advocate of the American system.