Time Will Tell

In 1956, The British Empire invaded Egypt. The largest and most powerful empire in human history, the British possessed a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and had colonial holdings over which the Sun never set.

But the British had a fatal shortcoming: monetary debt. They were bankrupt. There's an old saying: "Banks are more powerful than standing armies," and Britain's banker at the time -- America -- saw an opportunity to pounce.

And so, flexing its financial muscles, the United States threatened to dump its British currency reserves on the open market, and in an instant the British Empire was rendered toothless. If it invaded Egypt, it would face a financial crisis more severe than the Great Depression, as the British Pound would no longer be worth the paper it was printed on. And so in a move as humiliating as it was unexpected, The British military withdrew from Egypt, and almost overnight the once-mighty Empire crumbled into dust. Its colonial holdings, emboldened by Egypt's independence, quickly exerted their own sovereignty, and within months nothing was left of it but the British Isles themselves.

And yet, there's another old saying as well: "What goes around comes around." The United States of America, which had just committed the geo-strategic equivalent of patricide, would one day find itself in almost the exact same situation as the British.

Fast-forward to the early 21st century -- today -- when a haughty America stands on the precipice of a pre-emptive invasion of several small nations: Syria, Iran, North Korea, etc. Yet like our British counterpart, we suffer from the exact same ailments. Just as a tree rots from the inside out, and no one suspects its brittle nature until it one day collapses from a slight gust of wind, so too has our nation been hollowed out financially. Both our people and our government are deeply indebted to foreign bankers. China holds more dollar reserves than any other nation in history. And it has already begun to dump those currency reserves on the open market.

Will what began as a trickle soon turn into a flood? And will a bankrupt America also be rendered toothless overnight, as happened to our British predecessors? As with most things in this world, only time will tell.