AMERICA’S BYZANTINE STRATEGY
By Michail Ploumis June 14, 2018
The U.S. can do worse than emulate the strategy of an empire that survived for a thousand years.
The Roman Empire was the longest-lasting empire in world history, enduring more than fourteen centuries. Throughout its republican and imperial history, Rome relied heavily on military power, using conquest to expand the empire. As Luttwak observes in Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (epilogue), the legion was the basic tactical unit of the Roman army that fought “over both enemies and unreliable allies.†After the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century, C.E., the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire survived for an additional one-thousand years. Before finally succumbing to the Ottoman Turkish onslaught in 1453, Byzantium survived centuries of civil conflict, the Western Crusades, plague, the Christian schism, the rise of Muslim Caliphates under Mohammed’s successors, the ravages of the Mongols and other invaders of the Middle Ages, and numerous other challenges from both the east and the west. That it endured for so long amidst so much turmoil attests to a combination of good fortune and effective strategy. While we cannot learn much from luck, Byzantine strategy is instructive. Indeed, the United States’ current approach has much in common with the grand strategy of Byzantium.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/the-u-s-byzantine-strategy/
