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Politically, you are correct; there's no such thing as a natural border. Militarily, there are definitely frontiers beyond which the expenditure to conquer increases dramatically, and you recieve diminishing returns for success. Flying a plane is one thing, landing under fire is another. It's...

Expanding beyond your natural borders is a huge drain on military power. Economic and political power has far more of a snowball effect than warfare does. The safest bet would be to assert power through a nominally independent confederation or international organization, coupled with economic...

There is a problem with this framing though. Decolonization didn't cause major economic losses in Britain, France, or the Netherlands; all of these countries were more than compensated by the general post-war boom. Decolonization allowed the European powers to disclaim responsibility for funding...

I see. I suppose taking a purely evolutionary view is coherent, but not one that applies to every possible decision. I'll leave aside my defense of philosophy in general, since that's not what we're talking about. Let me use a better example. Let's say that, through biomedical advances, we had...

I agree with a lot of these points, but I think an advantage of democracy is bridging the Ought-Is gap (objective analysis can tell you what *is*, but not what you *should* do about it). I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on a system where the state's high-level goals are decided...