It is a mistake to analyze the actions of governments.  Instead, the actions of the people who make up governments should be the focus of study.  Their incentives, their ranges of possible actions, the benefits and costs of their actions, both perceived and real, and the belief systems which facilitate their actions are important.

Belief systems are necessary to maintain the momentum of governmental action.  They do not operate within a system of economic profit and loss and therefore must rely on other motivations.  These motivations must provide psychological cover for the violence, both threatened and real, that all government actions rest on.  Otherwise disgusting acts can be explained and condoned when a (pretended) higher goal is in mind.  Most, if not all, empires expanded on the foundation of some national philosophy or ethos which justified the subjugation of others, often for reasons that were explained to be for their own good.  These other live both inside and outside of the empire.

Compare nations where no such ethos exists.  The governments of these places are seen by their citizens as nothing but corrupt and as hindrances.  They focus their depredations, usually at a low level, inwardly since there is no enthusiasm or energy for outward expansion.

Finally, observe the historical collapses of empires.  They all coincide closely in time with the collapse of the national ethos.

Who acts within the government?  We see a mix of those who are simply selling their labor and those who act as entrepreneurs.  Both groups require different analysis than their counterparts in the private sector.  The labor sold to the government cannot be valued as discounted marginal product since it is not purchased by those who produce and sell in a competitive market.  The wages are paid with what could be considered stolen money.  No one willingly parted with their money to buy these services.

The entrepreneurs also do not profit by filling a demand in a competitive market.  Instead they act to sell policies, ideas, that can facilitate the goals of someone of higher rank than themselves in the government.  These goals must further not only the goals of the higher ranking individual, but also the goals of one of many organizations within the government, sometimes at the expense of other organizations withing the government, but they must always comport with the general ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the government as a whole.  This is the current they ride on and the cover they rely on for protection against the consequences of their actions.

This necessity of riding on the ideological current explains the group thinking and lack of questioning which seems so odd to thinking observers from the outside.  One need not truly believe the ideology, but one must at least feign belief if one wants to advance from within.  The beliefs of many of the policy entrepreneurs are fickle.  They are as subject to change as a restaurateurs menu.  One’s own beliefs as to the proper items on a menu or the proper governmental policy must be flexible enough to find an audience, a market.

But this flexibility is also the ever present precondition for the rapid collapse of empires.  Any expansionary government must convince those who pay for the expansion, the taxpayers, that there is a greater philosophical meaning behind the expansion.  When the facade of this philosophy falls away, and the expansion is seen as nothing more than a wealth transfer, those whose wealth has been transferred away withdraw their support.  The entrepreneurs quickly jump ship or find new markets when the ideological momentum stops or changes course.  Only the true believers are left to realize how few they truly were.

Maybe this explains the push for the US to be considered a “propositional nation”.  Without a proposition, the US has little to hold it together.  It has a decreasingly common culture from which to draw.  There is no common religion.  There are no real national founding myths.  It is no wonder then that such a blank slate would have a proposition drawn up for it by its rulers and their intellectual enablers that is fluid enough to empower and enrich those rulers in almost any situation, all the while maintaining the pretense of goodness and morality and historical purpose which excuses them from apologizing to its many victims and keeps the taxpayers from raising too much of a complaint.