The fall of empires

The history of Rome is not unlike that of the United States. Both are stories of monarchy, republic and empire, of military conquest and perpetual violence. And Rome’s dominion over the Mediterranean can be compared to that of the US over the Atlantic, though the passage from city-state to continental nation has vastly increased the scale of imperial rule. Both Rome and the US became increasingly dependent on their armies that began with conscripts and ended up with mercenaries. The conscript soldier fights with more or less conviction for an ideal, his mother/father land. The mercenary fights for the pay. The first, like Cincinnatus, goes back to his ploughing when the war is over. The second needs continual war to maintain his employment and income. Rome’s permanent legions were backed by industries that supplied standard equipment, from sandals to helmets and from wagons to war-galleys. During its expansion, Rome paid its wars with booty and slaves. When that expansion was halted by oceans, deserts and forests, the cost of maintaining the empire’s borders was paid with taxes. The wealth of expansion became the austerity of contraction. America’s imperial development was paid by access to new markets and raw materials. That has reached not geographical but geo-political limits, those of other imperial powers. Now austerity is biting and military expenses demand ever more taxes. Expansion pays for itself but, when it stops, maintaining the status quo gets increasingly costly.

All empires before and since Rome, notably the British one, have faced the problem of limits to expansion. For the past couple of centuries those limits have been the planet, which is big but not infinite. That finite world has reached a new hiatus, not unlike the one that occurred a hundred odd years ago, where a few major powers have divided it up and can only grow by encroaching on the others. And the mightiest power has the most to defend or lose. America’s dominion and influence peaked in the 1990s with the soft power of market forces. 9/11 marked the end of a gilded era. It signalled that the empire was not universally admired and was vulnerable. It set off a scramble by military and security forces to plug the gaps. And so it has been since then, with the gaps multiplying as fast as the cost of stopping them. America is engaged in a losing struggle, because expansion and contraction are the only alternatives of empire. The past shows that empires always resort to force in an attempt at holding back the inevitable. And this present bellicose situation is accompanied by a stupefying mountain of debt, and by global warming and species destruction. Falling empires have always been destructive. This one has the capacity of ending life on Earth. But that process may already be underway, without a nuclear winter. Yesterday’s victims have been commemorated abundantly, but no one is shedding tears for those condemned to die tomorrow. It seems that remembering the past is more comforting than imagining the future.