Not that I disagree with your previous points, but let's just look on the flip side here.
Why shouldn't it?
If you've done everything right to achieve such a position, why be punished for it, exactly?
And I'm absolutely sure that the Roman Emperors thought something along the same lines when hordes of barbarians, plagues, economic collapse and military defeats were making their empire crumble.
If we were going to look at things from a strict historical perspective, then the largest and most successful empires
were the most susceptible to negative events. It was a result of their success; size meant more interdependence between regions, more tempting targets to outsiders, longer borders to defend and greater strain on resources. A small empire could survive say, a 10% reduction in crops due to climate change, but for a major empire this would be utterly disastrous. Similarly, a disruption in trade routes to a small empire would certainly cause some hardship, but if trade breaks down in a large empire it's catastrophic, because regions are dependent on other regions for resources.
Every large empire in the pre-Industrial age hit a hard ceiling of development that they couldn't get past because they'd reached the limits of energy extraction from their environment. It put a hard ceiling on military strength, population, production etc. They hit the ceiling then fell victim a variety of factions; nomadic invasions, climate change, disease, economic collapse etc. It's what made the Industrial Revolution so revolutionary; it shattered that ceiling utterly by giving humans a massive boost in their ability to extract energy from their environment, one that wasn't constrained by food supply (muscle power) physical geography (water) or the way the winds were blowing (wind).
We're in a similar situation now though, because fossil fuels have boosted social development so high that the entire world is now connected into a global system. And just like ancient empires, the bigger they get, the more strain they place on their environment. Not just that, but we're in an age when a tiny European nation that is little more than an economic backwater can cause global financial markets to tremble.
So if we wanted to go for something truly historical, then the biggest empires really should have the nastiest events, or rather, be affected by them the most. Done correctly, this could be seen as a worthy challenge for greatness. However it runs a very major risk of being horribly unfun.