Pursued to any depth, the question of whether the United States of America counts as an empire becomes difficult to address with clarity. On one hand, the country has exerted a strong cultural influence on most of the world for the better part of a century, a phenomenon not unrelated to the military presence that extends far beyond its borders. (In Korea, where I live, I once met a former KATUSA, the branch of the Korean Army seconded to the US Army, who told me he’d joined because he “wanted to see what it was like to be a modern Roman soldier.”) On the other hand, we can’t quite say that it rules the known world — at least, not in the way that the Roman Empire did twenty centuries ago.
Yet the temptation to draw parallels between America and Rome remains irresistible, not least when it comes to the subject of imperial decline. In this video from Told in Stone, historian Garrett Ryan evaluates “the idea that modern America is destined to decline and fall like ancient Rome.” The arguments for this motion tend to involve “an increasingly unsettled international landscape” and “domestic division,” leading to the dissolution of Pax Americana — the successor of Pax Britannica, which itself succeeded Pax Romana. Americans, Ryan explains, “have a sense that Rome is in their political DNA. The constitution, after all, represents an attempt to create a new and perfected Roman Republic. Anxieties about Roman-style decline have been present since the beginning.”
Rome and America: each “was the greatest power of its time,” each “had a strong legal system and a society that left room for social advancement,” and each “professed to be guided by Christian principles.” Their political, economic, technological conditions could hardly be more different, of course, but when observers “say that America is falling like Rome, the underlying assumption is not that America is specifically like Rome; it’s that all empires, ancient and modern, follow a similar course from greatness to grave.” The Roman Empire fell because “Germanic tribes overcame its frontier defenses,” because “a series of ruinous civil wars sapped its strength,” because “it had lost the loyalty of provincial elites,” and for many other reasons besides — few of which are likely to play major parts in a notional American collapse.
But the fact that “the decline of Rome has no precise parallels in the twenty-first century does not mean that it has no lessons to offer modern America.” To learn those lessons, we could do worse than to turn to eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the subject of the School of Life video above. “The immense story that Gibbon tells us moves from one disaster to another, century after century,” says narrator Alain de Botton: failed reforms, institutional corruption, breakdowns in civil-military relations, plagues, poor harvests, economic collapse. And yet the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the arrival of modernity, as we know it, all lay ahead. “You aren’t going to like what comes after America,” Leonard Cohen once wrote, but maybe our descendants will like what comes a millennium or so after America.
Related content:
The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
