From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 12:29:12 MDT
Forwarding an interesting read about [some unlikely] Friends [e.g., Gore
Vidal and Charles Krauthammer], Romans and [various other] Countrymen [and
women]:
Double Edged Sword
Hail Bush: A new Roman empire
Sydney Morning Herald, September 20 2002
They came, they saw, they conquered. Now the United States dominates the
world. With the rise of the New Age Roman empire, Jonathan Freedland asks
how long before the fall?
The word of the hour is empire. As the United States marches to war, no
other label quite seems to capture the scope of American power or the scale
of its ambition. "Sole superpower" is accurate enough, but seems oddly
modest. "Hyperpower" might appeal to the French; "hegemon" is favoured by
academics. But empire is the big one, the gorilla of geopolitical
designations - and suddenly the US is bearing its name.
Of course, enemies of the US have shaken their fist at its "imperialism" for
decades: they are doing it again now, as
Washington wages a global "war against terror" and braces itself for a
campaign aimed at "regime change" in a foreign, sovereign state. What is
more surprising, and much newer, is that the notion of a US empire has
suddenly become a live debate inside the US. And not just among Europhile
liberals either, but across the range - from left to right.
Today a liberal dissenter such as Gore Vidal, who called his most recent
collection of essays on the US The Last Empire, finds an ally in the likes
of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who earlier this year told
The New York Times, "People are coming out of the closet on the word
'empire'." He argued that Americans should admit the truth and face up to
their responsibilities as the undisputed masters of the world. And it wasn't
any old empire he had in mind. "The fact is, no country has been as dominant
culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of
the world since the Roman empire."
But is the comparison apt? Are the Americans the new Romans?
The most obvious similarity is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the
superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest
budgets and finest equipment the world had seen. No-one else came close.
The US is just as dominant - its defence budget will soon be bigger than the
military spending of the next nine countries combined, allowing it to deploy
forces almost anywhere on the planet at lightning speed. Throw in its
technological lead, and the US emerges as a power without rival.
There is a big difference, of course. Apart from the odd Puerto Rico or
Guam, the US does not have formal colonies, the way the Romans did. There
are no American consuls or viceroys directly ruling faraway lands.
But that difference between ancient Rome and modern Washington may be less
significant than it looks. After all, America has done plenty of conquering
and colonising. For some historians, the founding of America and its
19th-century push westward were no less an exercise in empire building than
Rome's drive to take charge of the Mediterranean. While Julius Caesar took
on the Gauls - bragging that he had slaughtered a million of them - American
pioneers battled the Cherokee, the Iroquois and the Sioux. "From the time
the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving
westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation," says Paul
Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
More to the point, the US has military bases, or base rights, in some 40
countries - giving it the same global muscle it would enjoy if it ruled
those countries directly. According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, these US military bases are
today's version of the imperial colonies of old. Washington may refer to
them as "forward deployment", says Johnson, but colonies are what they are.
On this definition, there is almost no place outside America's reach.
So the US may be more Roman than we realise, with garrisons in every corner
of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the US approach to
empire looks quintessentially Roman. It's as if the Romans bequeathed a
blueprint for how imperial business should be done - and today's Americans
follow it religiously.
Lesson one in the Roman handbook for imperial success would be a realisation
that it is not enough to have great military strength: the rest of the
world must know that strength - and fear it. The Romans used the propaganda
technique of their time - gladiatorial games in the Colosseum - to show the
world how hard they were. Today 24-hour news coverage of US military
operations, including video footage of smart bombs scoring direct hits, or
Hollywood shoot-'em-ups at the multiplex serve the same function. Both tell
the world: this empire is too tough to beat.
The US has learned a second lesson from Rome, realising the centrality of
technology. For the Romans, it was those famously straight roads, enabling
the empire to move troops or supplies at awesome speeds - rates that would
not be surpassed for well over a thousand years. It was a perfect example of
how one imperial strength tends to feed another: an innovation in
engineering, originally designed for military use, went on to boost Rome
commercially.
Today those highways find their counterpart in the information superhighway:
the Internet also began as a military tool, devised by the US Defence
Department, and now stands at the heart of American commerce. In the
process, it is making English the Latin of its day - a language spoken
across the globe. The US is proving what the Romans already knew: that once
an empire is a world leader in one sphere, it soon dominates in every other.
But it is not just specific tips that the US seems to have picked up from
its ancient forebears. Rather, it is the fundamental approach to empire that
echoes so loudly. Rome understood that, if it was to last, a world power
needed to practise both hard imperialism, the business of winning wars and
invading lands, and soft imperialism, the cultural and political tricks that
worked not to win power but to keep it.
So Rome's greatest conquests came not at the end of a spear, but through its
power to seduce conquered peoples. As Tacitus observed in Britain, the
natives seemed to like togas, baths and central heating - never realising
that these were the symbols of their "enslavement".
Today the US offers the people of the world a similarly coherent cultural
package, a cluster of goodies that remain reassuringly uniform. It's not
togas or gladiatorial games today, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and
Disney, all paid for in the contemporary equivalent of Roman coinage, the
global hard currency of the 21st century: the dollar.
When the process works, you don't even have to resort to direct force; it is
possible to rule by remote control, using friendly client states. This is a
favourite technique for the contemporary US - no need for colonies when you
have the Shah in Iran or Pinochet in Chile to do the job for you - but the
Romans got there first. They ruled by proxy whenever they could. The English
know all about it.
One of the most loyal of client kings, Togidubnus, ruled in the southern
England of the first century AD.
Togidubnus did not let his masters down. When Boadicea led her uprising
against the Roman occupation in AD60, she made great advances in Colchester,
St Albans and London - but not Sussex. Historians now think that was
because Togidubnus kept the native Britons under him in line. Just as Hosni
Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf have kept the lid on anti-American feeling in
Egypt and Pakistan, Togidubnus did the job for Rome nearly two millennia
ago.
Not that it always worked. Rebellions against the empire were a permanent
fixture, with barbarians constantly pressing at the
borders. Some accounts suggest that the rebels were not always
fundamentally anti-Roman; they merely wanted to share in the
privileges and affluence of Roman life. If that has a familiar ring,
consider this: several of the enemies who rose up against Rome are thought
to have been men previously nurtured by the empire to serve as pliant
allies. Need one mention former US protege Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA
trainee Osama bin Laden?
Rome even had its own 9/11 moment. In the 80s BC, Hellenistic king
Mithridates called on his followers to kill all Roman citizens in their
midst, naming a specific day for the slaughter.
They heeded the call and killed 80,000 Romans in local communities across
Greece. "The Romans were incredibly shocked by this," says the ancient
historian Jeremy Paterson, of Newcastle University, England. "It's a little
bit like the statements in so many of the American newspapers since
September 11: 'Why are we hated so much?"'
Internally, too, today's US would strike many Romans as familiar terrain.
America's mythologising of its past - its casting of founding fathers
Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale rendering of the
Boston Tea Party and the war of Independence - is very Roman.
That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with
heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was
the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of
manifest destiny.
There are some large differences between the two empires, of course -
starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of the
known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own
imperialism. Most would deny it. But that may come down to the US's founding
myth. For America was established as a rebellion against empire, in the name
of freedom and self-government. Raised to see themselves as a rebel nation
and plucky underdog, they cannot quite accept their current role as master.
One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves
and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens to
all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from
beginning to middle to end.
"What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years," says the
Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, "is what is the optimum size for a
non-territorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders,
what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much
through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the Roman
empire."
Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof that
the US is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch.
But it's just as possible that the US is merely moving into what was the
second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew frustrated with
indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it?
Is the US at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its
most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that.
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