Mr. Philip Stephens argues in Friday’s Financial Times (13 January 2012) “How a self-sufficient America could go it alone) that Madeline Albright’s characterization of America’s role in the world can be the basis for a renewal of sorts in the future. This is certainly a delusion. Military power has often been confused with a sustainable future without an analysis of how that power is maintained and its effects on domestic conditions.
Ho Chi Minh once argued (Selected Papers, 1920-1966, Signet Series) that World Wars I & II were not world wars at all but European civil wars. He noted that the exhaustion of the combatants both in terms of national power and resources was evident, but that national policy was also a crucial element ignored by each side. In each war combatants used colonial troops and resources to bolster their war effort and the results of this was to militarize part of the population of the colonies which led to rebellions at the end of WWII, which the defeated and the victors would not withstand.
Using this scenario we can then compare the Anglo-American condition after WWII to the Roman situation after the Punic Wars. The contest against Carthage was, as Rostovtzeff (The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Oxford University Press, 1957) noted once, of controlling markets and grew from the colonial policies of the Greek city states over the previous 500 years. The defeat of Carthage can be seen as the end of the long civil wars of the Greek city states and the consolidation of the Mediterranean under one supreme victor as today with America over the various European national entities that appeared 500 years ago.
The Roman state following Carthage’s defeat was one of economic and political crisis with a vast separation in wealth of rich and poor and a ruined countryside with labor unrest at a high point. The following 100 years was spent in both an internal and external struggle between the residue of Alexander’s empire and the conflict between rich and poor that had earlier been settled in Greece with the defeat of both the noble party and the popular party and the domination of Alexander the Great. The same result took place in Rome with the partial victory of the nobility over Marius’s popular party in Sulla and then the final defeat of the nobility by Augustus and his suppression of the popular party. In each case the failure to produce a sustainable economic and political solution to wealth and power resulted in totalitarianism in kings and emperors. America’s situation differs little from these conditions and it is not a renewal we are on the path to create but a sordid resurrection of the “indispensable” conflict of our cultural heritage. The Chinese, like the Parthians before them, have only to wait and watch the horror.