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Like Rome Before the
Fall? Not Yet
Part two
PART
ONE
But the differences are palpable. The Roman economy
depended on agriculture whereas the United States
has an enormous industrial base, producing nearly a
quarter of the world’s manufactured goods, and
dominates the relatively new invention of the
service economy.
Rome was prone to internecine strife whereas America
is constitutionally stable. Rome was overwhelmed by
barbarians whereas America’s armed forces are so
powerful as to prompt dreams of what is known in
military doctrine as “full spectrum dominance.” Even
in an age of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, it
is hard to visualize an attack on America as
devastating as that inflicted by Vandals, Goths and
Huns on Rome.
Similarly, the British Empire was a weak empire. It
was acquired thanks to certain temporary advantages,
and run on a shoestring. It governed the multitudes
of India with 1,250 civil servants, and garrisoned
its African colonies with a thousand policemen and
soldiers, not one above the rank of colonel. The
thin white line often broke under pressure.
Then Britain lost a whole generation of
empire-builders during the First World War, and was
virtually bankrupted by the Second. It was bailed
out by the United States, which briefly sustained
the British Empire as an auxiliary in the cold war.
But its status as no more than a client was amply
demonstrated in 1956, when President Dwight D.
Eisenhower cracked the whip and stopped the
Anglo-French invasion of Suez. The empire was
quickly dismembered, its ghost surviving as the
Commonwealth.
Stemming from a tiny island, the British Empire was
once described as an oak tree in a plant pot.
American dominion, by contrast, is rooted in a
bountiful continent. But does not the organic
metaphor imply that states, like other living
things, will inevitably deteriorate and die? This
suggestion was convincingly denied by Lord
Palmerston, the champion of the Victorian “gunboat
diplomacy” that brought China to its knees. To
compare that country to a sick man or an old tree
was an “utterly unphilosophical mistake,” he said,
since a nation could adopt mechanical means of
self-renovation. This, needless to say, China has
done.
Despite its grave problems, there are some
relatively simple steps America could take to
recover its position. It could bring its military
commitments into line with its resources, rely more
on the “soft power” of diplomacy and economic
engagement and, as George Washington said, take
advantage of its geographically detached situation
to “defy material injury from external annoyance.”
Such a policy would permit more investment in
productive enterprise and pay for butter as well as
guns, thus vindicating Joe Biden’s faith in the
recuperative capacities of the Great Republic.
On the other hand, Paul Kennedy may well be right to
predict that the United States will shrink
relatively in wealth, and therefore power, as its
Asian and European rivals grow. Such contractions
can be traumatic, as suggested by the experience of
Britain, which, as Adlai Stevenson said, lost an
empire without finding a role.
However, the British now tend to echo the historian
Lord Macaulay, who said that the end of their
physical empire would be the proudest day in their
history if they left behind “the imperishable
empire” of their arts and their morals, their
literature and their laws. In other words, national
self-esteem should not stem from global might but
from cultural values and achievements. Faced by the
prospect of decline, Americans could hardly do
better than to cling to the noblest traditions of
their own civilization.
Piers Brendon, a fellow of Churchill College,
Cambridge, is the author of “The Decline and Fall of
the British Empire.”
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