Pax Americana: war and peace across the globe
America’s association with Roman precedents started at the inception of the republic, when the founding fathers made conscious choices that symbolised the connection between the newly established state and Rome’s republic in its prime.
Quotations from Virgil were inscribed on the nation’s seal and currency, while its capital city, Washington, was created in the image of its classical predecessor. Built on the site of a plantation named ‘Rome’, with a stream called the Tiber flowing under Capitol Hill, its neo-classical buildings and imposing grandeur belie the nation’s ambiguous attitude towards the Roman past.51 At the time, John Adams, no doubt reflecting on the new nation’s potential, enthusiastically declared ‘the Roman Constitution formed the noblest people and the greatest power that ever existed... Public Virtue is the only Foundation for Republics’.52 By 1987, however, at the bicentenary of the drawing up and ratification of the Constitution, if the belief in American exceptionalism still formed a vibrant socio-political narrative, the unsullied enthusiasm of the founding fathers had been tainted by American imperialism. Meyer Reingold, Classics Professor at Boston University, could still declare that the Age of Augustus and the Golden Age of American classical learning and political thoughtBoth set forth the vision of the beginning of a novus ordo seclorum, a new path in human history, through the rebirth of a moral society in which virtue, as definition of common purpose, and the consensual polity of a people making a fresh start, was exalted as transcending the pursuit of personal happiness and private interests.53
He was nonetheless aware that the United States had strayed from the lofty ideals of its founding fathers although just how much, he averred, was open to debate.54
Unlike the First French Republic whose concept of virtue was in social, political and economic counterpoint to what was perceived as the venality and hidebound hierarchies of absolutism—therefore only tenuously connected to that of Rome—for the United States the use of the Roman republic, and its concept of virtue, as a prototype endowed it with the quality of one of the ‘myths of origin’ of the American nation and thus made it a powerful ideological narrative.
As the opening paragraph of this chapter indicates, the linkage between Rome and the United States persisted well into the twentieth century, whether it was in references to a Pax Americana as in the opening quotation, or in the rather curious delusions of a man like General Patton, who allegedly saw himself as a reincarnation of Julius Caesar. The end of the Cold War, which was symbolised in the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, found the United States as the sole superpower, a situation that boded ill for world geopolitics for, as Lord Acton famously declared, ‘power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Or as a more contemporary observer put it, ‘the dangerously misleading conclusion that the United States caused the Soviet Union’s collapse and therefore “won” the Cold War’ produced a mind-set which ‘offers clues to how the United States, like ancient Rome, embarked on the path toward militarism and empire’.55By the end of the twentieth century the tenor of the comparison between Rome and the United States had changed. The naked imperialism of the 2003 Iraq War provoked a spate of books and articles asking the question, either directly or indirectly, ‘Are we Rome?’ Most made Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s thesis that twenty-first-century configurations of power were globally rather than imperially driven by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization seem, at best, naive or, at worst, an ideological smokescreen for U.S. imperialism.56 As Sebastian Mallaby put it, ‘The question is not whether the United States will seek to fill the void created by the failure of the European empires but whether it will acknowledge that this is what it is doing.’57 The triumphalists, in the Bush entourage, or the ‘fully paid up members of the neo-imperialist gang’, with whom the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson once identified himself, seemingly rejoiced at the fact the United States was assuming its imperial responsibilities and introducing a Pax Americana into a turbulent world.58 The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in Time magazine on the Bush Doctrine, was among the most vocal in this regard:
America is no mere international citizen.
It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.59For the less sanguine, however, the question ‘Are we Rome?’ no longer bore the confident stamp of a virtuous republic but rather the anxieties of the ‘perils’ or ‘sorrows’ of empire. If America’s aggressive militarism seemed to be a sign of its unrivalled world power, it was in fact a sign of its weakness rather than its strength.60 To avoid the inevitable decline that had overtaken other empires, it was useful to look at Rome, whose empire had arisen from the ashes of its republic paralleling the trajectory of the United States. Lessons could be drawn and wisdom gained, the political scientist Monte Pearson suggested, from examining the Roman experience.61 Pearson draws a parallel between the Roman response to the sacking of Rome by the Gauls in the fourth century BCE and the American response to 9/11. ‘In both cases’, he states,
this defeat at the hand of a barbarian enemy came as a lightning bolt, smashing cherished ideas about security and comfort in the homeland... In both cases security came to be defined as eliminating potential enemies before they had a chance to attack.
The sack of Rome by the Gauls made the Romans deeply fearful of invasion. They began seeking security by capturing and setting up ‘buffer states’. Thereafter their foreign policy can be described as ‘Defensive Imperialism’.62
Pearson’s close analysis of the similarities and differences between Rome and the United States is, as its title suggests, a clarion call to avoid the fate of Rome, whose citizens had ‘[t]heir liberties washed away in a swirl of cataclysmic events.’63 To achieve this, Pearson believes, the United States has to do what the Romans could not: give up its empire and build a new place in the world.64
In the same vein, the year after he stepped down as editor of The Atlantic, Cullen Murphy published Are We Rome? A slightly more optimistic account than Pearson’s, Murphy sets out to establish ‘a crude ledger of comparisons’ between the two republicscum-empires.
‘Rome and America’, he opines, ‘were the most powerful actors in their worlds by many magnitudes’, for ‘Their power includes both military might and the soft power of language, culture, commerce, technology and ideas.’65 In his detailed comparison of the two powers Murphy argues that in specific ways they are dissimilar but in important ways they are the same, sharing ‘certain dangerous traits—habits of mind and behaviour’ and facing ‘similarly fraught circumstances arising both from inside and from outside’.66 Unlike Rome, however, Murphy sees the ‘genius of America’ in the fact ‘it has built “the fall of Rome” into its very makeup: it is very consciously a constant work in progress, designed to accommodate and build on revolutionary change’. If America is making some of the same mistakes as Rome, the ‘antidote’ that will save it ‘is being American’.67 To the wary outsider, Cullen’s confidence may seem misplaced, but it certainly mirrors the sentiments of a section of the American population, whether or not they make the comparison to Rome. In much the same way in which nineteenth-century Britain and France were sufficiently confident in their imperial roles to imagine that their mistakes would be overshadowed by their civilisational virtues, so too does the United States believe the virtues of its democracy will outlive the tragedies of its mistakes. All, however, do not share Murphy’s optimism. Chalmers Johnson, for example, warns that the sorrows that befell the Roman Empire over hundreds of years were ‘likely to arrive with the speed of Fedex’ for the United States.68 Johnson is impatient with all forms of ‘soft imperialism’, whether it is expressed as ‘ “post-modern imperialism,” “neo-imperialism,” “liberal imperialism” or, even worse, the “right of humanitarian intervention” ’.69 Militarism and imperialism inevitably bring sorrows, and while he contends that the United States’ ‘sorrows of empire’ are the inescapable consequence of the belligerent path chosen after 9/11, he warns that ‘Militarism and imperialism threaten democratic government at home just as they menace the independence of other countries.’70 Above all, he intimates, espousing the slogan of theRoman leaders of ‘Let them hate us so long as they fear us’ (Oderint dum metuant) would guarantee that the United States would ‘cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in [its] Constitution’.71 To be sure, these twenty-first-century cautionary texts are all, to varying degrees, a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare and an awareness that empires do not last. In analysing the trajectory from republic to empire, Rome is the most obvious—and useful—paradigm that can illustrate the unwelcome scenario of the eventual demise of the United States as the world’s superpower.