Wes Riddle’s Horse Sense #390

Rise and Fall of Empires
by Wes Riddle

Success of a given empire has a lot to do with what, say, the imperial power does—but it also relies on conditions quite outside itself. For instance, British domination after 1800 depended upon the wisdom of imperial direction and on naval supremacy but also on the internal turmoil of China, self-seclusion of Japan, subjection of Mughal power in India, and disintegration of Ottoman rule in southeast Europe and parts of the Middle East. The vacuum and weaknesses abroad therefore facilitated the rise of the British Empire. Likewise, while internal weaknesses and strategic errors may have played a role—so did the conditions extant around the world as the sun finally set on the British Empire in just the past century. Now if we were to reverse perspective, the United States of America and its sphere of influence today is much the rest of the world to emerging empires. The contemporary rise of China and India for instance, albeit amid the process of globalization, depends upon relative strengths and weaknesses in what Jefferson once called our own Empire of Liberty or what passes today as such anyway.

It is interesting to consider how quickly the British heyday passed by. Its fortune and security has been inextricably tied, indeed dependent on ours since World War II. They were only on top of things as it were for a couple hundred years. In terms of American development and experience we have been about a hundred years behind at almost every stage of empire since the Revolutionary War compared to Great Britain. Industrialization occurred in the United States a hundred years behind theirs for instance. Moreover, American ascendancy was an early Twentieth Century phenomenon, so harbingers of the Twenty-First Century are dire. As Oxford historian John Darwin has observed after analyzing six hundred years between 1400 A.D. and the year 2000—tracing the rise and failure of countries during that timeframe, history demonstrates the mutability of fortune, sudden shifts in power, and unpredictable consequences of unexpected victories. In terms of the latter aspect the Cold War comes immediately to mind, how the U.S. “won” when the Wall came down to our utter shock and disbelief; and how it left us as the world’s only superpower; and how that status looks more tenuous and temporal than it did less than twenty years ago.

By “Empire of Liberty,” however, Jefferson did not mean anything akin to the British Empire or to what we have today. Indeed it is by becoming imperial of sort—encouraged certainly by the dangers and exigencies born of Great Depression, fascism and communism the United States may have stumbled into that role. Nevertheless, in so doing, we have become vulnerable to the same internal rot and uncontrollable circumstance vis-à-vis others in imperial competition, that effects decline of all such empires. For instance, years of overspending and borrowing by consumers, businesses and government, facilitated by the Federal Reserve, have precipitated a terrible credit and financial crisis. Panic has enabled Congress and the Executive branch to accrete unprecedented powers. General Motors (GM) for all intents and purposes is Government Motors. The banking and insurance industries both teeter on the edge of total nationalization. Meanwhile panic that previously gripped the country after 9/11 has given us a permanent Department of Homeland Security; and now the Department of Defense since October 2008 has assigned three active duty brigades deployed on American soil for homeland defense while the National Guard and Reserves (who could and traditionally would do those missions) are deployed overseas in fighting.

Power rarely makes careful distinctions, least of all concerning written constitutions. Extraordinary powers granted to government in response to some emergency are hardly ever rescinded after a precipitating crisis has abated. This unlikely process, however, may be what is required of us today, i.e., to retake powers granted to or assumed by the federal government. Michael Federici, professor of political science at Mercyhurst College has written that, “The Framers did not design the American Republic for imperial greatness, but when it functions as intended, it produces something even greater than empire: a free society with limited government and the rule of law.” In some ways that ‘something even greater’—what Jefferson meant by “Empire of Liberty,” has already receded if not altogether fallen away. The cumulative result largely of democratic actions, moving as it were from crisis to crisis, has created peril in the present and near future context. We now show all the pretensions of an empire built upon power in the classic Machiavellian sense, but that is precisely the type of empire, which has limited lifespan empirically over the last six hundred years of history.
The Founders wanted us to be around more than two hundred years at mortal zenith! They aspired to a permanence built upon the moral imagination, and they hoped for a free and virtuous people to keep their Republic, knowing full well that to keep it would entail disciplined subordination of purely economic considerations to whatever is good and true and ultimately imperishable, regardless of what others may do.