The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire

[rangerrebew]

The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire
By Darin Gaub
July 1, 2023


A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.


In The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon outlines the life and death of what was arguably the greatest empire to ever exist. Rome, like most empires, consumed itself from within while there were plenty of enemies chipping away at the edges ready to pounce when the time was right. Time and space do not allow me to retrace the steps of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire, but having read the book, it is easy to find similarities between Rome then and the United States now.

First, what is an empire? Merriam-Webster’s dictionary uses the following: a. a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority, or b. something resembling a political empire, especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control. 

There is no debate about whether Rome was an empire, but there is room to debate if The United States is one today. I believe the U.S. is an empire even though it does not resemble what people often think of when using the term. Here are a few reasons why I believe this.

We have 50 states and 14 territories spread across nine time zones.

We have approximately 750 known military bases in 80 countries or more. Add in the classified locations and those where other agencies of the U.S. Government exist and the number is north of one thousand.

We have Dozens of protectorates.

We are a military, economic, and cultural superpower.

This looks like an empire to me.

https://armedforces.press/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-empire/

[rangerrebew]

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
 

Just like Nazi Germany did.

[The_Reader_David]

Just like Nazi Germany did.

Arguably Germany never constituted a great civilization, and to a great extent Nazi Germany did destroy itself from within.  Had they not spent resources on the "Final Solution" that could have been devoted to the war effort, or Hitler's racial theories been a bit more tied to genetics, and less to linguistics, so that they would have seen the blonde-haired, blue-eyed speaker of Slavic languages as "Aryans" and actually come as liberators to Ukraine (and even Russia), they might have won.  As it is Naziism rotted whatever claim Germany had to being a great civilization (maybe inventing the modern PhD and their scientific preeminence in the 19th century gives them some claim), squandering the patrimony of Frederick the Great and Bismark in the evil pursuit of an illusory notion of "racial purity".

[The_Reader_David]

Not another nitwitted application of Gibbon's interpretation of late antiquity to the current American situation.  Surely if one wants classical analogies, the late Roman Republic, or the Athenian over-extension in the conquest of Sicily are more apt. 

Gibbon is really quite useless as a source of apt historical analogies, as it was he who invented the notion that the non-event of the retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples in 476 constituted the "Fall of Rome".  The Empire went on for nearly another millennium, with its capital at Constantinople, albeit dwindling to a city-state in its later years.  At the time no one noticed that anything much had happened.  Indeed when Charlemagne had himself crowned Emperor, he didn't think he was starting a new Empire, only reviving the dormant office of Western Augustus.  it was only when the Empress Irene declined to recognize his claim that he proclaimed his Empire to be the "Holy" Roman Empire and began slandering the organic continuation of the original Roman Empire as the "Empire of the Hellenes" (in those days "Hellene" had the sense not merely of Greek, but of pagan Greek, so it was slander.