The Freefall of An Empire

Empires rise and fall. The fall seems inevitable, no matter the apex of power, no matter the durability. Not everything in life is completely controllable, and therefore the best efforts tend to peter out against the sustained vicissitudes of time and exogenous factors. But whether the process is temporarily halted or foolishly hastened is a choice. In a manner of speaking, America seems to have chosen the latter, much to the chagrin of its European friends and to the delight of its foes.

Many lament the ineptitude of America to manufacture goods anymore, especially in comparison with China and the like. But the one thing that the United States is second to none in producing is its own enemies. Unnecessary enemies, one should add—from ‘Democracy Building’ misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq through to regime-toppling initiatives around the world, the unintended and perverse consequences of which are on display in Libya, arguably Ukraine, and beyond. In Europe, some American policymakers bemoan weak Germany, and say that Europeans should shoulder more responsibility. Many Europeans concur. And wonder, bewildered, whether our American colleagues remember whose idea it was to produce a militarily feeble Germany. 

Sure enough, one might like to apportion at least part of the blame to others among the World War II Allies, eager as they were, to partition Germany into statelets. This is well illustrated by the following quip, various versions of which are flexibly attributed to, among others, the French writer François Mauriac, the former French president François Mitterrand, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or the beloved oddball hero Winston Churchill: “I like Germany so much, I want as many of them as possible.” After the decades-long split into two Germanies, the country continues to live under the thumb of its benign conqueror well after the reunification. The result has been, predictably, weakness by design. To paraphrase the first secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Lord Ismay, the purpose of NATO is to keep Germany down, Russia out, and America in. By these standards, it has performed admirably. The trouble is that nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War, this objective may no longer serve the best interests of the parties involved.

The ‘Endless Wars’ game, however, grows tiresome, too. Europeans—by some stretch of imagination, one could make the case, America’s most natural if not best allies—strain to see what friend throws her comrades under the bus as soon as she can have it out with Russia, proxy-style, on the frozen battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Why should the European Union countries on her eastern flank have to pay a hefty premium (let alone, heaven forbid, perish in a blaze of molten rock and neutrons) for American liquified gas, shipped there senselessly from another hemisphere, when the Siberian gas is cheap, plentiful, and just a stone’s throw away? The problem is that despite the incessant stream of agitprop, the proportion of Europeans who truly lean into the narrative that self-immolation for the sake of trouncing America’s arch-enemy is somehow beneficial to them as much as it may be to the United States is scant. The number of Europeans believing in Russian columns bent on advancing into Lisbon if Ukraine goes under is smaller still. In the olden days, the EU used to have an ambition to overtake the U.S.—at least economically. Now it struggles to formulate its own position without cues from an American teleprompter, instead regurgitating formulaic phrases about democracy and values.

Which beckons the twin-question of which values, and what democracy, exactly? Is it the ‘pick your pronouns’ panoply of values, famously enshrined in Code Napoléon, or perhaps the more ancient Greco-Roman values of systemic racism against Europeans under the guise of the—to borrow the euphemism—‘Affirmative Action’? This agenda is hardly popular in America, but it takes a special kind of courage to promulgate in Europe. Is the dream of a peaceful, prosperous, and free Europe being attained by the EU mimicking a foreign power that appears increasingly hostile to itself and its friends? These are hard questions about which the Euroatlanticist crowd may not have been entirely honest with themselves.

But perhaps the harder question is ‘what democracy’? The ancient Athenians would be aghast by the modern American notions of democracy. As Donald Kagan, a Yale professor, points out, from having the Supreme Court justices handpicked top-down for life, or unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats having an outsized influence over the lives of the general populace, these kinds of glitches would be downright shocking to Pericles’ constituents (to make use of an anachronistic term). As would be the idea that any infinitesimal minority goes right over the heads of the majority, and that this is somehow the epitome of democracy. 

Indeed, modern America resembles the Athenian project only in the form of its unspoken empire, the Delian League. Ostensibly founded in order to fend off the Persians in the wake of their Second Invasion of Greece, the alliance was hegemonically controlled by Athens who placed the League’s treasury on the nearby island of Delos (later moved directly to Athens), and did not hesitate to teach truculent members a valuable lesson in democracy with swords and spears (Naxos and Thasos). These island states grew dubious about their membership when it turned out that the Persians were simply not eager to come back, but the dues—disproportionately propping up Athens—had to be paid anyway. As a thought experiment, one could replace Athens with America, Delos with Brussels, the League with NATO, and the gingerly paying states with … well, almost any NATO member … and watch how quickly one gets labeled a Putin puppet, a Russian troll, a disinformation spreader, a conspiracy theorist, and if one is lucky, maybe even (somehow or other) a white supremacist. There’s always room for that.

Some may argue that the United States isn’t foisting itself on anyone. Countries can withdraw from NATO any time and that American soldiers are not present in these nations against the will of their hosts. Granted, there are no mass protests. But one would be hard-pressed reading about mass protests against the Soviet forces in the Warsaw Pact countries either (notably, the Prague Spring happened before the Soviet occupation. Thereafter, no one dared speak out for obvious reasons.) We could also think to what extent Japan, Germany, or South Korea can have a foreign policy that would go against their Big Brother. Think Nord Stream and the hapless German chancellor watching, quietly, as the American president stood right beside him and said: “We will bring an end to it.”

But America is a constitutional republic. Therefore, the Roman example may serve as a better analogy. After all, Rome—or the Western half at least—also never referred to itself as an empire. Long after Octavian stood at the helm of Rome on the heels of his victory in the Battle of Actium, or Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the veneer of republicanism, complete with sham elections, continued to belie the true nature of power in the Eternal City. Let us conduct a mental experiment. Suppose that we imagine America to have been an empire since, say, the annexation of Hawaii or the Philippines as an unincorporated territory. Now that we have set up the analogy, recall that Rome did fall—but not in one fell swoop. Another Yale historian, Paul Freedman, referred to the event as possessing a certain Planet of the Apes’ quality—that is, the deterioration of material culture of relatively epic proportions. Rome fell from grace, going from a Welthauptstadt of over a million inhabitants to a mass of abandoned stone structures, crumbling and overgrown with vegetation, silent witnesses to shepherdesses and their grazing flocks skittering about ancient thoroughfares. The fall, however, lasted decades, centuries even. It continued slowly, inexorably, until Diocletian, whose reforms put a stop to it for over 150 years.

It might be that America can still be saved, and will rise from the ashes. But lately, other signs prevail. Scenes that are somewhat reminiscent of the famous painting The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius by the English painter John Willian Waterhouse depicting the emperor Honorius (from the time after Diocletian when the decline had locked in in earnest) feeding “his favorite” pigeons instead of receiving emissaries and dealing with the ailing empire’s many problems. Or another, perhaps less well known, painting by the French painter Georges-Antoine Rochergrosse showing the Huns pillaging a Gallo-Roman villa, kidnapping the women, while the Roman soldiers are nowhere to be found.

But if one should accept the notion that America is the empire of today, and furthermore that it has commenced the trajectory of terminal decline, in what phase of collapse might it be? What should her European allies do in anticipation of the inevitable vacuum once she retreats? Even the Dark Ages weren’t so dark if one knew how to organize oneself. Rediscovering the virtues of self-reliance seems the logical first step on the path toward new sovereignty. The ‘dark’ qualifier, however, befitted those who waited endlessly for a Roman army that was no more.