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By what metrics?
Certain people are always lecturing me that "the only reason the west is rich is because of all that silver that Spain expropriated from Bolivia"; if we accept that profitable resource extraction / trade windfalls was both the objective and a successful objective of colonial occupations, where's my silver dollars made out of Axis bullion?
Given that a plurality of the Bolivian silver wound up in China and not Europe, I think certain people really don't have an accurate view of colonial trade flows.
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Don't listen to certain people. But more seriously, in the time since Bolivia everybody learned that trade windfalls can be wildly positive sum, so now from Japan we get efficient cars and giant TVs instead of shiny discs and resentment.
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Seignorage. The US is able to finance it's colossal debt expenditures at relatively low interest rates because the monetary system based on the dollar allows it to finance a huge current account deficit by printing $100 bills and "selling" them abroad. The Japanese and Germans, two very productive peoples, will accept $100 bills in exchange for their actual industrial goods because they have to, they were forced into the Dollar System as part of their post-war occupation. So everything the government does with that debt, that's the occupation of Germany and Japan in action.
Changing emphasis, it's never been that way
The plebs never shared in the wealth of empire, certainly not equally. Marx details the conditions the Victorian English factory laborer endured, in many ways worse than slavery, 12-16 hour work days, 6 days a week, for starvation wages. Where were their mountains of Indian loot?
Cato the Elder and Younger, among many others, famously argued against imperial aggrandizement because it created inequality in Rome itself, creating a bifurcated society where before relative equality had reined. Cato the Elder passed numerous laws against luxuries which had appeared as Rome had grown rich on plunder; it was not Rome that had grown rich but Rome's upper classes who could afford such luxuries, and Cato's Republican virtue wanted to see that kind of ostentation stamped out, and Rome's elite refocused on good relatively-egalitarian Republican Stoic farm virtues. The plebs made do with bread and circuses, that was what they got from empire.
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By the metric of "created enduring friendly sphereling", and by the metric of "didn't crater military morale", at the least. Whether you want bullion more than the first is a matter of taste (getting both trades off against each other to some extent), but I don't think there's anyone who'd claim the Vietnam/Afghanistan occupations went better than Germany/Japan (Iraq didn't fail nearly as hard as Afghanistan and Vietnam - no more strong, hostile Iraq - although I still think you'd have a hard time finding someone who thought it went better than Germany/Japan).
I ask this in all seriousness, don't think I'm being facetious: what good does that actually do (a) the West/USA as a whole, and (b) me, some pleb in the West, personally.
Because I don't feel like I am deriving much advantage from the "privilege" of these "friendly spherelings" allowing my leaders to spend my tax money on giant boondoggle bases on their land while Germany doesn't pay it's NATO contributions.
I really would rather that Russian citizens were paying their taxes for Russian bases in Germany and Japan, and I am very happy that I don't have to fund Afghani bases any more. Happier than I was when my taxes were paying for Afghan tribal leader's boy sex slaves.
After you've already won the Cold War? I'm not sure, maybe it's no longer useful.
Didn't do me any good during the Cold War either. The reason we work a 40 hour week instead of an 80 hour one is because Soviet tanks scared Western capitalists into making concessions to labor. If those bases hadn't been in Germany the Western capitalists would have been more scared and we'd be working a 20 hour week now instead.
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