The United States itself is a spin-off of the British Empire. I'd say that counts for something.
Well I disagree on multiple fronts and here is why:
1. The US is a continental size nation while the British were a island nation and that gave us for example access to far more resources than the British had which is why the US is no where near reliant on colonies as the British were as well. To get a perspective how big the US is, the distance from Lisbon to Moscow is still over 250 miles shorter than the distance from San Francisco to Boston.
2. The US has far more hard military and economic power than the British ever did. The Royal Navy while comparable to ours, their ability to fight a war on land was no where near as extensive as ours. It is why they tended to always try to maintain the existing balance of power which is very different than the Foreign Policy of ours since 1945 with the possible exception of detente.
3. The US morally has not done anywhere near the bad stuff the British did
I’m not disagreeing with any of this. I’m just saying we literally are an offshoot of the British Empire and wouldn’t exist without it. Britain is the US’s mother. And there’s a timeline where we didn’t split, or at least didn’t split until much later on, in which case the British likely would be considerably more powerful today and we’d be more like Canada.
why/how would Britain be more powerful today if we split off later? I guess they would have taken more of a lead in the development of nukes during WWII, what else? Perhaps we'd have invested more in the Navy and less in the Air Force due to their influence (or maybe the opposite would be true?). I can't see how the UK would be substantially better off than in the real time line though without stealing value from the US in huge chunks and I got a feeling we wouldn't have been cool with that for very long.
Am I missing something?
Poll
