John Rapley
RECENTLY, A friend of mine who teaches history at Oxford University gave me a sneak preview of a book he has written. Historians have long maintained that the Roman Empire fell because of its internal decay. But in his book, Peter Heather shows that at the time of its final collapse in the fifth century, the Empire was actually healthier than has long been assumed.
Instead, Dr. Heather argues provocatively, Rome fell because outsiders - those people known to history as the barbarians for their peculiar dialects - brought it down. And they did so because Rome's immense wealth, built in part upon raiding their territories, but in any event closed off to them, proved too alluring a target to resist.
I have been reflecting upon this a lot lately. The reason is that the last few years have seen yet another spate of literature trying to read the tea-leaves on whether the U.S. is itself an empire in decline. There is some debate about whether the U.S. can even be considered an empire in the classical mould. After all, it does not maintain direct administrative control over territories said to fall into its orbit.
AMERICAN ECONOMY HEALTHY
However, the really heated debate is over whether the U.S. is declining or not. On one side, optimists maintain that the American economy remains healthy and resilient, its military power is unrivalled, and its society adaptive.
On the other side, though, pessimists point to America's rising fiscal and trade deficits, its absence of saving, its widening gap between rich and poor, and its diplomatic and military blunders as pointers of a bleak future.
But what unites all these discussions is that they probe for the evidence within America. None treat seriously the prospect that America could decline due to forces beyond her borders.
This bias may be understandable. After all, the Cold War still casts a long shadow over American scholarship. Generations of intellectuals, on both left and right, beheld a world in which the greatest threat to America came from another superpower. With the fall of that superpower, it truly appeared that there was no other game left in town.
History may not repeat itself. It may not even, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme. But if the U.S. is an empire, it would not hurt her to learn the lessons of her predecessors. Obviously, no empire is eternal. But a more obscure lesson may be that the greatest threats to empires sometimes come not from other superpowers. In Rome's case, all rival claimants to that status had been dispatched long before its fall.
TROUBLING EVENTS
Instead, Rome fell to impoverished, disorganised societies at her edges. Today, while Washington's foreign policy elites argue feverishly over whether China will be a friend or foe, whether Russia will rise again, or whether Europe might enjoy a renaissance and turn its back on America, more troubling events are happening at the edges of its own empire.
Recent research has shown that in the post-Cold War world, the concentration of wealth in the planet has grown ever greater. Over the last decade, trillions of dollars have flooded from around the world and into the U.S., giving it a global ascendancy that rivals what Rome in its day enjoyed over the Mediterranean world.
But at its fringes, as we know too well, instability, poverty and even anarchy are multiplying. And in these so-called failed states, the ground for those who would wish to attack the empire has grown fertile.
On the streets of America's cities, the future may look abundant and promising. But it may just be that there is some fiddling while the fires begin burning.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
