Just shows how uneducated people like Beto are. We aren’t an empire, empires take stuff or directly govern and tax from those places they keep troops. Most of our troops are there to protect the places they are and we pay for them. Also they are a deterrent to certain countries militaristic tendencies. I’m looking at you Germany specifically and Europe in general. Also Japan for that matter. Europe couldn’t go a decade if not a year without widespread war for probably 2000 years until the US said enough is enough after WW2. Now you can argue and I might even agree that we shouldn’t be the world police, but the fact is that the whole world more often than not is better with those US troops in the vast majority of locations. Hardly an empire though ...