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Like Rome Before the
Fall? Not Yet
Part
One
PART
TWO
By PIERS BRENDON
NYTimes, Published:
February 24, 2010
Cambridge, England
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN complains that he is being
driven crazy because so many people are betting on
America’s demise. Reports of it are not just
exaggerated; they are, he insists, ridiculous. Like
President Obama, he will not accept “second place”
for the United States. Despite the present crippling
budget deficit and the crushing burden of projected
debt, he denies that the country is destined to
fulfill a “prophecy that we are going to be a great
nation that has failed because we lost control of
our economy and overextended.”
Mr. Biden was referring in particular to the
influential book “The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers” by Paul Kennedy, a British historian who
teaches at Yale. Published in 1988, the book argues
that the ascendancy of states or empires results
from the superiority of their material resources,
and that the wealth on which that dominance rests is
eroded by the huge military expenditures needed to
sustain national or imperial power, leading
inexorably to its decline and fall. The thesis seems
a tad schematic, but Professor Kennedy maintains it
with dazzling cogency. In any debate about the
development of the United States, one would
certainly tend to side with the detached historian
rather than the partisan politician.
All too often, however, students of the past succumb
to the temptation to foretell the future. For
reasons best known to himself, for example, the
eminent British historian A. J. P. Taylor predicted
that the Second World War would reach its climax in
the Spanish port of Vigo. Equally preposterous in
its way was Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the
conclusion of the cold war marked the end of
ideological evolution, “the end of history.”
When indulging his own penchant for prophecy, Paul
Kennedy too proved sadly fallible. In his book, he
wrote that Japan would not stagnate and that Russia,
clinging to Communism, would not boom economically
by the early 21st century. Of course, Professor
Kennedy did not base his forecasts on runes or
entrails or stars. He weighed the available evidence
and extrapolated from existing trends. He studied
form, entered suitable caveats and hedged his bets.
In short, he relied on sophisticated guesswork.
However, the past is a map, not a compass. It charts
human experience, stops at the present and gives no
clear sense of direction. History does not repeat
itself nor, as Arnold Toynbee would have it, does it
proceed in rhythms or cycles. Events buck trends.
Everything, as Gibbon said, is subject to “the
vicissitudes of fortune.”
Still, history is our only guide. It is natural to
seek instruction from it about the trajectory of
earlier great powers, especially at a time when the
weary American Titan seems to be staggering under
“the too vast orb of its fate.” This phrase (loosely
taken from Matthew Arnold) was used by the British
politician Joseph Chamberlain to depict the plight
of his nation in 1902. The country had indeed
suffered a severe setback during its South African
war and its global supremacy was under threat from
mighty rivals in the United States and Germany. Yet
the British Empire was at its apogee.
Paradoxically, the larger great powers grow, the
more they worry about their vulnerability. Rudyard
Kipling wrote this elegy to the empire, of which he
was unofficial poet laureate, to mark its most
spectacular pageant, Queen Victoria’s Diamond
Jubilee in 1897.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dunes and headlands sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Aptly quoting these lines exactly a century later,
when Britain gave up its last major colony, Hong
Kong, this newspaper’s editorial page noted that the
queen’s empire had been relegated to the history
books; the United States had become the heir to
Rome.
Now doom-mongers conjure with Roman and British
analogies in order to trace the decay of American
hegemony. In so doing they ignore Gibbon’s warning
about the danger of comparing epochs remote from one
another. It is obviously possible to find striking
similarities between the predicament of Rome and
that of Washington (itself modeled on classical
lines, incidentally, because it aspired to be the
capital of a mighty empire). Overstretch is common
to both, for example: Rome defended frontiers on the
Tigris, the Danube and the Rhine; America’s informal
empire, controlled diplomatically, commercially and
militarily, girdles the globe.
Piers Brendon, a fellow of Churchill College,
Cambridge, is the author of “The Decline and Fall of
the British Empire.”
Cont'd 1/2
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