gracchusdixit

There was very little in Donald Trump’s State of the Union harangue that added anything new to his usual stew of self-aggrandizing exaggerations, half truths, and outright lies.  One, brief sentence, however, deserves more attention than it has received.  It was:  “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”  In this at least, Trump was indubitably right.  

There is, alas, no indication that Trump believes his own words or is prepared to act upon them.  Apart from a hasty and half-baked decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, he has done nothing but sanctify and squander more money on our nation’s already bloated war machine.

The global military presence of the United States of America is greater than that of any nation in history.  We have more than 800 military bases around the world and deploy 450,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators in 150 countries.  Our military spending is equal to that of the next seven nations in the world combined.  We spend three times more than the Chinese, nine times more the Russians, and twelve times more than the French, whose military spending is the largest in Europe.  American armed forces are actively engaged in more than a dozen conflicts, none of which has ever been authorized by a declaration of war, as stipulated in the Constitution, let alone justified by an imminent or an even remotely credible threat.  The cost of all this consumes the lion’s share of the federal operating budget and strangles our ability to fund even the most basic domestic needs:  public education, our crumbling infrastructure, healthcare…the list goes on and on.

Those who defend this ghoulish militarization of our national priorities often speak of a Pax Americana, a phrase borrowed from the British, who were fond of calling their empire a Pax Britannica.  The British, in turn, borrowed the term from the ancient Romans, who created a true peace, the Pax Romana, which stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to the banks of the Euphrates, from the cold, craggy hills of Scotland to the shifting sands of the Sahara.  For centuries, the Pax Romana brought order to an otherwise chaotic and violent world.  Roman cities had aqueducts and baths, libraries and theaters, hippodromes and arenas, but they had no walls—because the invincible Roman legions stood guard on the distant frontiers of the empire. 

All empires rationalize their predatory behavior and profit-making by invoking some higher purpose.  The French told themselves that they were bringing civilization to the benighted people of Africa and Indochina, all the while they stole their minerals, their raw materials, and their freedom.  The British idealized their global empire with talk of the “white man’s burden,” as they systematically looted countries and cultures thousands of years older than their own.  And now, our foreign policy establishment, cheered on by the national media, seeks to justify the pursuit of American self-interest—and to excuse American hubris—by comparing our global military hegemony with the Pax Romana.

There is no comparison between the two that is even remotely plausible.

A British chieftain, who led an unsuccessful rebellion against Roman rule, famously said:  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem apellant.  “Where the Romans make a wasteland, they call it peace.”  It was a Roman historian, skeptical of his nation’s imperial entanglements, who recorded—or more likely, invented—those words. The irony is that those words were fundamentally untrue.

For all their flaws and failings, for all their cruelties and brutality, the Romans did not create a “wasteland”.  On the contrary, they created a civilization that lasted more than a thousand years.  They built roads and bridges and aqueducts; they founded cities by the hundreds; they brought a common language and a common culture to the Mediterranean world; they grounded their empire, not simply on the caprice of its rulers, but on the rule of law.  The civilization they built was the first in human history to transcend the parochialisms of race and religion, tribe and nation.  Its allure was so compelling that millions longed to say:  Civus Romanus sum.  “I am a Roman citizen”.   

Next to such achievements, what does the so-called Pax Americana add up to?

We call our country an “exceptional,” even an “indispensable,” nation, without pausing to wonder whether the rest of the world bothers to agree.  We talk endlessly of our commitment to democratic values, without questioning why we have so often toppled democratic governments and propped up tyrants, dictators, and anti-democrat regimes.  We exalt a “rules-based” global order, without asking who made those rules, who profits from them, and whether they are even remotely just.  Most hubristically of all, we cast ourselves, in the words of Ronald Reagan, as “a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere”.  Only a Hollywood-actor-turned-politician could turn the words of the Sermon on the Mount into a cynical, empty, and shopworn cliché.  The man who famously said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” is also the man who infamously and secretly sold weapons to the Iranians, using the proceeds to fund an illegal war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua.  This is the kind of “peace” we have all too often given the world.

When we eventually abandon our military bases, as we inevitably will; when we ultimately surrender our role as “the world’s last superpower,” as we inevitably must; what will remain of the Pax Americana?  The answer is:  next to nothing.

It was Rudyard Kipling, the de facto poet laureate of the British Empire, who foretold the end of that empire.  But he could have been speaking about our empire, when he wrote:

Far-called our navies melt away;

On dune and headlands sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

The accomplishments of the Pax Americana are not even remotely akin to those of the Pax Britannica, let alone the far greater Pax Romana. There will be little to remember of its legacy, nor will its passing be lamented.  In pretending otherwise, we deceive no one but ourselves.