Is the Sun Setting on the American Empire? | The 1600

0:00Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The 1600. I am Carlo Versano. We're coming at you once again from our quote-unquote Long Island Bureau, which is really my parents' house. We will be back in the studio next week, so you'll see us back in our normal habitat next time you watch us here. This country was stone-cold dead. Today, I wanted to take another pause on the day-to-day news and talk about a little political theory, a little historical theory. There is a trope in historical theory that empires tend to last roughly 250 years, which, if you've been paying attention, is just around the time that the good old United States has been around here.

0:39This trope, and it is a trope because it's not totally true, which we'll get to, was popularized by the British general John Glove in 1976. The theory suggests that major empires, whether it's the USA or someone else, English, French, have a sort of natural flow of rise, peak and collapse over that time period. And it comes in six predictable stages, right? You got pioneers, the conquest phase, the commerce phase, affluence, intellect and decadence. So I would certainly argue, and I think probably many of you would, too, that we are in the decadent phase here in the 250th year of this great country.

1:14But I did want to probe the question a little more. Is America in its late Roman Empire era? Are we coming up on the end of whatever this great experiment has been? And if so, what comes next? So my guest today is Dr. Charles King. Dr. King is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, author of many history books, couldn't get to them all if I wanted to list them right now. Also three-time professor of the year award as voted on by his students. Charles, welcome. Thanks so much for taking the time, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Delighted to be with you. I mentioned three-time professor of the year because when I read that about your bio, I thought that's pretty impressive.

1:51That's probably more impressive than a lot of literary awards you may have received in your time. Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I love teaching. I love being with students. And so I'm really honored by that. Very good. OK, Charles, we're coming up on August, which is a month that is, of course, named after the first emperor of Rome, Augustus Caesar. This is my tortured way of creating a peg for this conversation. But it is sort of true that the specter of the Roman Empire sort of looms large, hangs heavy over modern day America. What is it about the Romans that make that period so relevant today?

2:27Well, you know, I think Rome is kind of the perennial analogy for rise and fall, for greatness, for a great civilization, for how a great civilization falls into decline or decadence, as you say. You know, and this goes back to the very beginning of the United States. All of the great figures of the 18th century in American history were classically educated. So they read Latin, they read Greek. The analogies that suggested themselves to these individuals, Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and others, were all classical references. And so they were looking, when they looked out into the world to try to make sense of things that were going on around them, the place they looked was back into the history that was most familiar to them.

3:16What's fascinating about Rome is that it's kind of an analogy for anything you want it to be an analogy for. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. And if you think you happen to live in uniquely bad times, you'll find plenty of Roman historians, Tacitus and others, who would agree with you. And you can find some consonants with what they were writing about their own times. On the other hand, if you think you happen to live in a golden age, you might sort of go back to the second century, say, of the Roman Empire when the empire was at its limits. It had expanded across most of what is the Mediterranean world and Western Europe today.

4:02So it depends on what you go looking for, how well Rome will serve you. So the reason why I ask you, and I probably should have mentioned this in the intro here, but you had a recent op-ed in the New York Times, great piece. We'll link to it in the description. The headline was, What the Definitive Book on Empire Says About America Today. And it was a sort of, you used the hook of the 250th anniversary, not of America, but of the first volume of Edward Gibbon's book, which is called The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a familiar book to many of us who read in college, or at least read parts of it in college.

4:37It's a million and a half words, you know, not to get through that. Right. So anyway, so Gibbons published this for the first time a few months before the Declaration of Independence, which I actually didn't realize. Kind of incredible. In short, what is Gibbons' thesis? What is his argument in that book, which you called in the Times piece the most influential English language work of history ever written? Yeah, it is. Because keep in mind, this is the thing that was published in February of 1776. So everybody who is meeting in the Continental Congress, everyone who eventually signs the Declaration of Independence would be familiar with this book.

5:15It was one of those things that, you know, you would have to have on your coffee table, as we would say now. The great fact about this book, six volumes, a million and a half words that everybody read, everybody had a copy of, is that Gibbon himself changed his mind about what he thought was important when it came to understanding great powers over the course of those six volumes. He began with a particularly kind of conventional, I would say, view of things, that the decline of a great power, the decline of an empire begins with the decline of civic virtue. And that's something that would have been very familiar to readers in the 18th century, you know, that a polity, a society, a great power doesn't just depend on institutions.

6:03It doesn't depend on military force. It depends on virtue. It depends on the individual qualities that the citizens bring to the table and that they are encouraged to have by the institutions of education, of the church in the 18th century, religious institutions, the military. Societies have to cultivate virtue. And if they don't do that, decline is imminent. And as things go on, he's a little less convinced that that's the key, the secret to decline. but it's certainly where he began. And it's why that first volume in particular, which came out in 1776, spoke so powerfully to the founders, because they looked at their own society, not America, but of course, the wider British empire.

6:50And they saw it as a place that had given up on civic virtue. And one of the things that the declaration was going to do was to create a society that would restore it. Right. And they're talking about these concepts to civic virtue at the time, which is life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, I suppose, at the time, which transmuted into the pursuit of happiness as we know it. Were they cribbing from Gibbons directly, you think? Well, by the time you get to the Declaration, not directly from Gibbon. It took time for books to arrive from across the East. Right. And so on. But later on, everyone is familiar with this.

7:26Thomas Jefferson sold his copy to help restock the Library of Congress after it was burned by the British. Madison uses it too when he's eventually writing Federalist Papers and his contributions. And Franklin's familiar with it. Everyone knows this book eventually because it seems to be speaking to exactly their moment. Why do things decline? What accounts for the fall of great powers? And what can you do before you get to that stage to try to hedge against it? So you write in the piece you call Gibbon, quote, the perennial prophet of what happens when a good country goes bad, which is a line I really like.

8:09Are we a good country that has gone bad? Well, I think the United States is certainly a country that's struggling with the idea of the relationship between individual virtue and civic virtue, frankly. You know, for people on the political right, you know, if you happen to be, for example, an evangelical Christian in the United States and you're not struggling with the question of how a political leader who seems to be absolutely unvirtuous, right, the office of the president can be the kind of vehicle for the policies that you hope to see realized in the world, you have to really be struggling with that.

8:47On the political left, you have to be struggling with the concept of virtue itself, which seems to have been captured by the right, right? I mean, the political left has no kind of language about the role of individual virtue, ethics, morality in the way society as a whole is structured, right? The left is much more comfortable with the idea of institutions, right? Change the rules, change the institutions, and individuals will change and not so comfortable talking about individual virtue or individual morality. So, so much of the language of the founding that people like Gibbon and Jefferson or Franklin were wrapped up in is a lost language to us, you know?

9:28And I feel like we can learn something from the 18th century in resurrecting, whether you're on the right or the left, resurrecting some of that language as ways of making sense of our own time. Right. No, it's so true, right? Because it's both. I mean, there's individual virtue. I mean, the conservatives are basically right about that, that individual virtue is, at least small c conservatives, hugely important. And then, of course, the left is right that the institutions are sort of what pull it all together and ours are declining, which is something I want to ask you about, or decaying, I should say.

10:02I want to ask you about in a minute. I want to go back to the sort of trope that I mentioned in the beginning about this idea of like 250-year empire lifespans. Obviously not so simple, right? Depending on where you count from. I mean, the Roman Empire lasted between like 500 and 1 ,000 years. There are some empires that fit the 250-year framework. I looked them up because I didn't know. The Qing Dynasty in China, that was like 1650 to 1900. The Persian Empire from 1500 to 1750. If you really want to go back into the history books, the Gupta Empire in India, which was in like the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.

10:36D, are you a believer that empires can be analyzed based on this sort of idea of like similar lifestyles, life cycles over similar timeframes? And if so, what stage would you say we're in? Yeah, I mean, I think the short answer is no, that I don't think history works according to predictable laws in that way. Of course. You know, nor did Gibbon. I think the reason we study history is sort of to enlarge our field of experience, not to sort of divine, you know, a secret to the way that the world works, but rather to peer into the lives of other people whom we can never meet because they happen to be dead and to try to make sense of why they made decisions the way they did.

11:15And the reason you do that is to be more self-aware about your own decisions, right, about the policies that you're pursuing. Not because you know exactly the way in which the policy you might be pursuing at the moment is going to turn out at best of history, but because you can kind of telescope your own personal experience by looking into the lives of others. So to me, I think ultimately the project of, you know, sort of listing the six causes of imperial decline or whatever, I think that's probably a vain project at the end of the day. And history probably won't give you the kinds of answers that you expect.

11:54Yeah, more complicated than that. In the media, we're always looking for very simplistic, you know, frameworks. You know, it's a totally professorial thing to say that it's more complicated than that. But I think that's the bucket of cold water that historians really usually show up with. And it's usually, you know, it's like taking a cold plunge. It's usually pretty good for you. No, here to that. So my recollection of reading Kevin in college is his thesis, which you've alluded to already, is basically that Rome fell because of a combination of militarism, military adventures, and a loss of civic virtue, as you mentioned, as well as sort of like moral fortitude, right?

12:35In other words, Roe became decadent, overly expansionist. It was the sort of like one-two punch of institutional decay, geopolitical overreach that did them in, maybe add civic virtue to that. Is that kind of a rough understanding of what actually happened? Well, there's certainly some themes that he's interested in. He's interested in what happens when you devote too much time and energy to foreign conquest and then to defending the borders that you have created. He's interested in why people go on international, these international imperial adventures in the first place. He's interested in what happens kind of at home with your institutions and with laws and particularly the hollowing out of old institutions.

13:22You know, things that might have arisen for some completely rational reason and served really well in the past, but then continue as kind of shallow forms of their old selves and don't really serve the purpose that they used to serve. I mean, he has this wonderful line in the first volume in which he says something like, you know, people would submit to slavery provided that they could be assured that their ancient freedoms were still being respected. And that's one of the things that already under Augustus, the empire had a very good sense of how to how to manage. That is to pretend that what you were doing was keeping the old ways alive while slowly changing them from within in favor of in that instance of a kind of one one man rule.

14:13Right. So he's interested in all of those things, I think. Right. No, I know. I keep trying to like sort of boil this down, but I'm just, I want people to sort of understand the sort of basic contours of what we're talking about. I keep, I keep thinking of this line that Obama used to use. It wasn't actually his line. It was a famous Martin Luther King Jr. line. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. I thought of it because in the opening of your piece in the Times, you write that the arc of civilization bends towards barbarism, which is sort of contra what Obama would use, would say.

14:43And I would agree with you. So, I mean, you know, we thought we'd be fascism in World War II, right? We've seen it come back. Not to necessarily compare the two, but communism is the, you know, forms of it is sort of like the flavor of the month among some younger aggressives, some younger, you know, far left people. What is it about sort of the human condition that makes these ideas so hard to kill? Well, you're, you know, we keep coming back to sort of human ways of solving big problems. And this kind of, you know, give them a belief that the kind of self-delusion was one of the great constants of history.

15:21This idea that you don't really quite understand where you are in any kind of historical process. You're always confused, right? We don't have a historical lens that we can put on ourselves. We can't project ourselves in the future and look back on where we are now. Our great-great-grandchildren would say, how could they have done this? How could they behave the way they behaved? And one of the reasons that you study history is to try to do that, you know, to try to magically project yourself into the future and wonder whether your decisions will be perceived by the future as being kind of barbaric.

15:52So, you know, I don't think there are grand lessons to take away from history. As I say in the piece, corpses are terrible tutors and you probably shouldn't go looking for your lessons among them. But there are good ideas, you know. Guard your institutions. Make sure the civilization you claim is worth preserving in the first place. If you claim a heritage, claim the bad parts as well as the good parts, you know, and and be a grown up, be a grown up about it. You know, sort of imagine the ancestors that you claim doing really horrific things as well as really grand and memorable things. And it's, you know, the reason you study history is to live in that moment, to live in that kind of grown up world in which you have to do all those things at once.

16:44Right. I mean, I always think about that. Like, would I have been a slaveholder in the early 1700s? I don't know. Right. I mean, based on my skin color and where I was in the class system, it's certainly possible. Right. I mean, how many things do we do now that our children and grandchildren will look back on as barbaric? Right. I mean, I always think of like whenever I take my daughter to the zoo, I always have that thought because to me, it's like even though I appreciate that it's not the same as slavery, of course. But like there's something kind of disgusting about the fact that we keep animals in cages so that we can come, you know, look at them and like throw peanuts at them.

17:22But anyway, yeah, no, it's a good framework. So op-eds like the one you wrote, Charles, I think that they probably get read by two different audiences. Right. It's like there's the conservative sort of like America. is decadent doomer audience, which is probably the, to the extent that there's conservatives reading the New York Times, I think it's probably those types of conservatives. And then there's the sort of, you know, the place where I come from, which is the liberals who are sort of like institutions are collapsing under Trump, also doomers. Which class of doomers is closer to sort of where you are?

17:57Well, I have to say in reading Gibbon and thinking about, you know, it actually makes you less of a doomer of either time. You know, this is a guy who devoted his entire life to writing one book. It was a very long book. It was a very, very long book. But that's the only major thing he did with his life. And what he wanted to know kind of in the end is what's left of this great civilization. And as he looked around him, he said, you know, He thought, my goodness, that the impact that Roman civilization had on the world is extraordinary, right? From law to culture to language to the very definition of what a great power is.

18:46And it's one that not so much fell as transformed itself over time, you know, from the empire in the West, which falls in the fifth century, to its successor, the Byzantine Empire, right? Byzantines already in the 15th century when they're conquered by the Ottomans. They want another thousand years. Yeah, that goes on for another thousand years. And they're still calling themselves Romans. Now they speak Greek, right? And they're wearing tunics rather than togas. But they call themselves Romans. And then there's, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, which is this global organization, and it calls itself Roman Catholic for a reason.

19:27So, yeah, the big the big key in a way, and I go back to the point we're talking about earlier, is wherever you are in your civilizational art, make yourself worth preserving, you know, make it worth preserving. And that is what, just to finish this point, you know, I think that's in some ways the tragedy of our present moment, is that, you know, it's one thing to say, here are my values. I believe in human rights. I believe in equality. I believe that the arc of history bends toward justice. I believe that more people should vote rather than fewer people voting. Like those are my values. I believe the United States should be a good power in the world, but should be a power in the world.

20:14So those are my values. And then we live in reality. And so I know that those values are going to get compromised and maybe even get compromised a lot because of the world that we live in. That's one way of behaving in the world. Another way is to say my values are the nation is supreme. Some people are more fit for governance and leadership than other people. Fewer people should vote, and the world would be better if fewer people voted. And I'm going to put my faith in a messianic single leader who is deeply unvirtuous. And then if you realize those values perfectly, you are not a better society than one which, to me, has more humane values at its core and realizes them only imperfectly.

21:02That, to me, is the challenge of America right at the moment, is that we have these really contrasting values at stake. And that's where we are at our own 250. No, and I mean, you talk about compromise, right? Isn't that one of the greatest human virtues there is, our ability to compromise with one another? Yeah. Well, and to believe that we're governed by a set of rules that apply to everybody, the laws that apply to everybody, and that power is iterative. In a democracy, certainly, if I don't win this time, I might win next time, and I believe that there will be a next time. That's also a compromise, I suppose.

21:45I'm glad you brought this up because we've been having this discussion in the newsletter vis-a-vis the war in Iran recently. And I've just talked about how, you know, I've become so much more of an isolationist based on the last basically 20 years of my life in which we've been in, you know, quagmire after quagmire, fiasco after fiasco in this region. And, you know, is there a world where the United States can take a step back and, to your point, a power, still be a power in the world, but not always be, you know, the power of last resort for solving these sort of like internecine, you know, conflicts in places where most Americans couldn't even put them, place them on a map, right?

22:23And I think about the famous Fulterre quote. I don't even know if it was really him who said it, but like the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Right. And it's like the same is kind of true of the quote unquote liberal international order that we've been living under for the last whatever 80 years was never very liberal. It was never very international and wasn't particularly orderly. You know, it was American hegemony that was sort of keeping things together by either force or threat of force. So it's like, am I arguing against myself? Like, what happens if the USA sees the role that that it's currently in as sort of like the global hegemon?

22:58Is it just does everything just go to shit immediately? Well, yeah, I mean, well, it's very clear that other powers are out there who are quite happy to have some version of that role, whether regionally, if not globally. And certainly in the case of Russia and China, even more in China's case, a power that does have some kind of global ambition. So it's going to look different from the nature of American global hegemony if it ever came to that, but certainly with the ambition to project its power kind of around the world. You know, regional hegemonies never stay regional. Ambitious powers seek to expand that power at some point.

23:41And, you know, Gibbon by the end, by the time he got around to volumes five and six, he was particularly interested in what happens in declining powers. And by this stage, he's sort of in the deep into the Byzantine Empire. What happens when declining powers forsake their allies? He has these really remarkable scenes where the last several Byzantine emperors are running around Europe trying to secure allies that their predecessors had forsaken as the Ottoman Turks are advancing into their territory. And when you read those scenes now, you kind of think, my God, this looks really familiar. Yeah, right.

24:23The only way you sustain a global order in the modern world is as a network of like-minded powers, not a kind of go-it-alone hegemon. You're working on a book about this, right? What can you tell us about it? I know you said you're sort of still in the writing stage of the book, but I'm curious about it. Yeah, it's a book about Gibbon and the writing of this monumental work, you know, because keep in mind, Gibbon, he was sitting in the British Parliament during the American Revolution. He was deeply in love with a woman who was escaping the French Revolution by 1789 and early 1790s. To him, it looked like the world that he knew was collapsing.

25:04And so he turned back to Rome as a way of trying to understand how history works, what happens when you're in the middle of a collapsing order. And so the book is really us looking back at Gibbon, looking back at Rome and trying to make sense of our own times. When's it coming out? Do you have a date yet? I don't yet. In the next year, year and a half, I imagine. We'll have to bring you back on when you have a publication date. Charles, before I let you go, just on that last point, what lessons can modern democracies, whether it's us or somebody else, draw or not draw from Rome's rise and fall?

25:44Yeah. I mean, I think, again, history is not replete with lessons, but it does have a lot of good ideas. Make your society one that future societies that come after you will want to remember, you know, make your, make the things that you project into the future, a heritage that somebody might want to inherit, as opposed to a lesson about decline that they might want to want to take away. And make sure that you have mechanisms for transmitting whatever it is you think are your best qualities, your best traits as a civilization. How are those going to get transmitted to people who are going to look and talk and believe very differently from you, you know.

26:33And that, if you want to boil down Roman history, the history of the Roman Empire, to one single thing, that is the enduring genius of this civilization. That it figured out a way of Christianizing the barbarians, you know, taking the concept of a senate and transmitting it to 21st century America, having architectural forms and artistic forms and poetic forms that have turned out to be eternal, right? Even if the political system itself is no longer around, even if the borders are no longer around, that's an inheritance. It's not a lesson about decline. No, and it's cultural, right? Yeah. Yeah.