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If a country stay smalls to remain true to its roots, it eventually gets absorbed by an empire. Conversely, if a country plays for empire, and truly achieves world domination, it absorbs so many that its subjects eventually outnumber the imperial core. And thus the empire, too, loses touch with its roots. Stay small and get conquered. Get big and get diluted. I like Switzerland and agree that it was arguably an exception to the rule. But it isn’t anymore and hasn’t been for some time. It capitulated to Obama in 2009 on financial privacy, and so Swiss bank accounts don’t really exist. The Swiss (perhaps understandably) sanctioned Russia after 2022 and nuked the Credit Suisse bondholders, in violation of financial neutrality. That neutrality is now found only onchain. The country is also de facto a member of NATO and the EU, even if not de jure. And is moving towards de jure. It’s a member of the Schengen zone and signatory to 100+ bilateral treaties, which means much of its law is already written in Brussels. Basically, like all Western European countries, it’s already just a protectorate of the American Empire and no longer has real foreign or domestic policy independence. And Switzerland now feels it needs to *formally* join the US/EU empire or get beaten by Russia, which is the dynamic I mentioned above: small countries get absorbed voluntarily into one empire, or involuntarily into another. It’s still formally neutral, but it’s neutral in name only. The economic and military benefits of being part of a scaled empire were too great. See post above. Unfortunately for Switzerland, it’s losing its neutrality at a bad moment in history, by being sucked into the gravitational black hole of the Western sovereign debt crisis. It’s getting pulled into a declining empire, instead of benefiting from a rising one. Maybe it suffers less damage than its neighbors due to legacy neutrality, but it won’t be unscathed. That said, if you had to live in Western Europe, you’d likely live in Switzerland, as it may have the best financial position among its neighbors. Yields have actually gone negative there. It might be the cleanest dirty shirt in the region. America absolutely did build an empire. I don’t mean this in a negative way; it was by many measures the greatest empire of all time. And global military dominance is what allowed it to issue the reserve currency, and spread the political, technological, and economic ideas you mention. See map below. This is not the posture of a republic that just wanted to sit meekly behind its borders, as today’s American right often claims. Nor is it really a democracy, as the American left would have it. I mean, did the citizens of all these 80 countries really make uncoerced *votes* for foreign troops? We have to start by understanding what America is. Neither republic nor democracy, but empire. As a small follow up to this thread, here’s Switzerland gradually evolving away from neutrality.