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Empires do not have to decline. What has struck at the heart of empires in the past is the tendency to overcontrol. The distant outpost can cause great concern to the principal center, and excessive resources could be spent wastefully in trying to regain control, once it has been allowed to slip. Most usually, this is an ego thing on the part of the chief ruling group at the head of the empire.

But successful corporate enterprises have many characteristics in common with empires, and a number of successful strategies have evolved. There must never be fear of cutting loose a difficult or recalcitrant colony, that is simply cutting your losses. Withdrawal, and allowing the locals to fumble around and sink into self-induced anarchy for a few years, does wonders for stiffening spines in the colony. The trick is to manage to prevent any opportunistic revolutionaries from springing into the vacuum.

So long as the rule is relatively benign from the empire, most colonies find the arrangement to be beneficial. Of course, those at the center get even wealthier than they were before, but a well-managed subsidiary can grow to a maturity of its own, as it is given more and more autonomy. The empire need not decline, but it grows and evolves into a loose federation of first-line and subsidiary states, an organic international association. The problem with imposed federations like the League of Nations or the United Nations is that there was no effort to prepare the smaller nations for the responsibilities that went along with membership as they were simply admitted, without any attempt to groom them for the requirements of civil discourse and political compromise. The United Nations cannot ever become a Parliament of mankind, without a common understanding of the basic rules of order.

The British came probably closer to this model than anyone in history, but then they gave up the necessary discipline to maintain and nurture the empire, probably to some of the Fabian notions that targeted and undermined the principles of duty, honor and allegiance to central standards of excellence.