September 14, 2007
NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT:
A quick history lesson: America is no Rome: The tired analogy of imperial decline and fall (Gerard Baker, 9/14/07, Times of London)
From the moment that America became top nation in the middle of the last century, people have been racing to be contemporary Gibbons, chronicling the decline and fall even as it was supposedly happening. Not the least of the objections to their efforts is that Rome’s domination of the known world lasted about 500 years, and survived more than the odd thrashing or two at the hands of barbarian tribes. In modern America, it’s always the same. Every lost battle or turbulent day on the foreign exchanges and the obituary writers are sharpening their pencils.The bigger objection is that America is not much of an empire after all. No one pays tribute, no one declares allegiance to Caesar, and what kind of empire is it that owes its foreign subjects a couple of trillion dollars? Still, as Gibbon himself noted in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.” Which brings us back neatly to General Petraeus and the Iraq war. [...]
It is helpful to think about Iraq this way. Imagine if the US had never been there; and that this sectarian strife had broken out in any case – as, one day it surely would, given the hatreds engendered by a thousand years of Muslim history and the efforts of Saddam Hussein.
What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities? There would be some who would want to wash their hands of it. There would be others who would think that UN resolutions and diplomatic initiatives would be enough to salve our consciences if not to stop the slaughter.
But many of us surely would think we should do something about it – as we did in the Balkans more than a decade ago – and as, infamously, we failed to do in Africa at the same time. And we would know that, for all our high ideals and our soaring rhetoric, there would be only one country with the historical commitment to make massive sacrifices in the defence of the lives and liberty of others, the leadership to mobilise efforts to relieve the suffering and, above all, the economic and military wherewithal to make it happen.
Indeed, rather than think of Iraq in the abstract, if we just consider it alongside the various wars of, particularly, last century, we can see that an eventual sorting of the sects into more coherent consent-based nations was pretty much inevitable and that it is mostly our failure to force that process after WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and phase one of the Gulf War that has delayed the reckoning until now. The problem isn't that our empire is declining--we never had one--but that we didn't smash the remains of the British, French and Ottoman ones thoroughly enough when we had our chances. That's the problem with Democratic calls for withdrawing from the Middle East now. All they would do is leave unsustainable regimes -- Iraq, the Lebanon, Syria, etc. -- in place once again and lay the groundwork for our future interventions. Better to seize the opportunity provided by 9-11 and finish destabilizing the entire region. That's what we do to places that haven't liberalized yet. The only question is: at what pace? Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2007 12:00 AM
"What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities?"
The Kurds and the marsh Shia - among others - would be surprised to know that the author thinks these are hypothetical questions.
Posted by: Rick T. at September 14, 2007 8:22 AMem·pire
n.
A political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations and ruled by a single supreme authority.
The territory included in such a unit.
An extensive enterprise under a unified authority: a publishing empire. (my addition: The Anglosphere?)
Imperial or imperialistic sovereignty, domination, or control: "There is a growing sense that the course of empire is shifting toward the . . . Asians" (James Traub).
____
Based upon the defintion(s), one should accept OJs case that we are more of an "anti-Empire" than an empire.
I find myself somewhat persuaded by both the aticle and OJ.
The operational difference, however, is pretty small. To be an effective "anti-Empire", you simply need to benevolent enough to expand your sphere of influence.
The fact is that if it walks, talks and quacks like an Empire, then it probably is one in most people's eyes.
They can therefore be forgiven for talking about "collapse" - particularly when vast swaths of our nation is uneducated, our bridges and levies are collapsing, all while a class of piggish patrons retard our progress and bankrupt our governments with their "make work" jobs and the unsustainable pensions attached to them.
Posted by: Bruno at September 14, 2007 9:45 AMTheir declinism is wrong! Mine is right!
Posted by: oj at September 14, 2007 10:45 AMOJ,
Thou Dost Protest Too Much.
You should read "The Black Swan" The author is annoyingly egomaniacal, but the book is interesting.
As always, in my debates with you, I hope to be proven wrong.
Posted by: Bruno at September 14, 2007 12:17 PMKeep in mind, the great lesson of Black Swan is that fluctuation is trivial. The direction is always up.
Posted by: oj at September 14, 2007 12:59 PMI've been reading Gibbon for a while now and actually finished the fourth volume just last evening. I recently browsed through a "general foreword" to an abridged version I also have on my shelves, written by a classics professor at Florida State.
There's a bit of subtle agitprop in there implying that Gibbon and the American Founders held similar views on religion, and of course the whole essay ends with an ominous warning about how America holds "military supremacy" over the whole planet and that a close reading of Gibbon may augur our decline.
It's funny how predictable this is. With the exception of stuff written by Daniel Boorstin, I'll bet you'd have a hard time digging up a single scholarly overview of Gibbon written since the fall of communism that did not try to use it to predict our possible downfall. You can't help but think that at least some of the writers are looking forward to it.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at September 14, 2007 6:23 PMAll the "declinism", and even the "anti-declinism" reflected in some of the foregoing remarks, are marred by a misunderstanding of imperial power in 2007, as distinct from that power in, say, 100 A.D..
Just as the attempt to describe the Middle East in modern, Western language fails, so seeking to describe the existing World Government in the language of the Roman Empire is doomed to confusion.
Such talk is a meaningless as applying the Westphaliam notions of so-called "sovereignity" to the present situation.
Deeds, not words, capabilities, not declarations, set out who is it that gives law to the world.
The reason this has eluded many, here and elsewhere, is that they have bought into the Marxist heresy that Imperialism necesarily is a bad thing and into the Boxerist losers' lament to the effect that the lesser breeds are better off mired in their loved Egyptian night because it is authentically theirs.