You’re connecting the dots perfectly. When you can print unlimited money, you can afford unlimited military adventures to secure resources and markets. It’s the same extractive playbook, just with aircraft carriers instead of colonial armies.

This is exactly why sound money matters. Under a gold standard (or Bitcoin), you can’t fund endless foreign interventions because the money actually has to come from somewhere real, taxes or productive output.

The printing press enables the empire. Cut off the printing press, and suddenly “spreading democracy” becomes too expensive to sustain.