Looking
at empires through history, we can identify several things that most
of them have in common. One is that their leaders often say or seem
to believe that their imperialist policies have little to do with
self-interest.
We can
see an example of such denial in Pericles’ famous funeral oration
as recorded in the second book of Thucydides’ history of the
Peloponnesian War. The speech was delivered in 431 B.C., at the
height of the Athenian Empire. Athens was expropriating tribute from
its subject states and had built the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and
soon the Erechtheion on the Acropolis. In other words, the
Athenians were diverting a good portion of their allies’ tribute
paid to them - which was supposed to be devoted to mutual defense -
to enhancing their city. And what does the imperialist leader
Pericles have to say of his grand visions? He calls Athens “the
school of Hellas” and proclaims that it will enjoy “the
admiration of the present and succeeding ages.”
Athens
won’t need a poet like Homer to memorialize it, Pericles continues.
Why? Because, he says, “we have forced every sea and land to be the
highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good,
have left imperishable monuments behind us.” In other words, Athens
is proud of its mission to uplift the other Greek city-states - by
force.
Likewise
with the Roman Republic and Empire. Caesar went into Gaul in 58 B.C.
and in a nine-year period killed perhaps one million Gauls and
enslaved another million. And yet in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and
in later Roman literature, we read that Rome brought civilization to
Gaul. The elite of Gaul were to wear purple togas, enjoy habeas
corpus, and have aqueducts, so it was all for the good.
Similarly
with sixteenth century imperialist Spain, which variously sent a
force of 1,500 soldiers into Mexico in 1519 under Hernán Cortés. In
two years they destroyed Tenochtitlán, ancient Mexico City, wiping
out probably 200,000 people. And was the purpose to gain land, gold,
and riches to help in the fight against Protestantism and Islam in
Europe? Not exactly, according to Bernal Díaz, who was on the
expedition. Rather it was more to convert souls to Christianity and
to stamp out sodomy, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. To be sure,
the conquest had these effects. But were the death and destruction
really all for the sake of the conquered?
“The
White Man’s Burden,” a long controversial poem by Rudyard
Kipling, published in 1899, was addressed by a citizen of imperial
England to the United States, which was currently fighting what many
saw as an imperialist war in the Philippines. One of the poem’s
stanzas reads, “Take up the White Man’s burden / In patience to
abide / To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride /
By open speech and simple / An hundred times made plain / To seek
another’s profit / And work another’s gain.” This sense of duty
sums up the common imperialist mindset: imperialism is a burden,
undertaken reluctantly and for the good of the uncivilized. There is
little self-serving about it.
Another
trait empires have in common is obviously their dependence for
enforcement on some type of superior military power—most often a
navy. True, the Spartans controlled a land empire, as did the Soviet
Union; but those empires were confined with self-imposed limitations.
If a state becomes a naval power, as Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out
in his classic works on the influence of sea power on history, then
it can move troops around to the rear of an enemy, impose boycotts,
or modulate trade and supplies to help allies or hurt recalcitrant
colonies.
The
greatest empires have always been maritime. The Mediterranean, which
the Romans referred to as mare nostrum or “our sea,”
has been the seat of empires throughout history because of its
geography—it is a convenient sea for imperialists in the middle of
three land masses. The British Empire, of course, was entirely a
result of British naval superiority.
A
third characteristic empires share in common—perhaps the most
interesting and thoughtworthy—is that for all the supposed
advantages to be had through imperial rule, a historical case can be
made that it has never quite penciled out. The costs of control seem
to outweigh the benefits, even though—human nature being what it
is—the imperialists tend to be oblivious to the expenses, perhaps
because of the power and grandeur that come with empire.
One
reason imperial policy seems superficially advantageous in terms of
costs and benefits is the seduction of absolute power, as implied by
the Caledonian (Scottish) nationalist Calgacus in 85 A.D. As
recounted in Tacitus’s history, Calgacus complains of the Romans in
addressing his troops: “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give
the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.” In
other words, if imperial powers can’t conquer a country and bring
it into the fold peacefully, they wipe it out as a signal to others.
So much for benefits to either the imperialist power or its subjects.
One
corollary to the unprofitability of empire is that it tends to
corrupt the character of the imperial power.
The
Athenian Empire was based on the idealism of 180 subject city-states
being offered the advantages of democracy. City-states conquered by
Athens were required to become democracies—and what can be wrong
with that?
But in
415 B.C., a large Athenian naval force went to the island of Melos
and demanded that the Melians submit and begin paying tribute.
Thucydides recounts what ensued, the famous Melian Dialogue, in the
fifth book of his history: You’re either with us or against us, the
Athenians threatened, and if you are against us we will destroy you.
The Melians countered that they should be able to remain free and to
maintain neutrality in Athens’ war with Sparta. The Athenians
rejected the idea of neutrality. The Melians further argued that
destroying Melos would result in anti-Athenian sentiment in Greece.
The Athenians replied that it would instead result in fear and awe at
Athens’ power. In the end, the Melians refused to submit. Following
a siege, the Athenians massacred the adult men of Melos and enslaved
the women and children.
As an
aside, when I was 18 and just beginning my study of the classics, I
was astonished when I read in Thucydides that when the Peloponnesian
War broke out, most of the Greeks wanted Sparta to win. Was not
Athens a democracy and Sparta an oligarchy? Athens was the home of
Socrates, Pericles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Sophocles. Sparta
was rural and backward with no navy or beautiful temples or walls. It
represented Doric severity as opposed to the Ionic cosmopolitanism of
Athens. Why would the Greeks prefer that Sparta win? I didn’t
understand the anomaly when I was 18, but the simple answer soon
became clear: Sparta was not then imperial—or at least not as
imperial as Athens. Empires like to think of themselves as having a
lot of friends, but they are often naive in forgetting the depth of
the ill-will they incur.
As if
the destruction of Melos wasn’t enough to show the hubristic
corruption of imperial Athens, the following summer, Athens sent a
force of 40,000 troops to Syracuse to conquer or destroy the largest
democracy in the Greek world. The Sicilian Expedition, as it came to
be known, was a complete disaster. Thucydides says at the end
of his seventh book, “they were destroyed, as the saying
is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything
was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.” For all
practical purposes—although the Peloponnesian War would go on for
another nine years—the Sicilian debacle marked the end of the
Athenian Empire and illustrated the follies of unchecked imperialism.
It can
be argued that the Roman Republic underwent a similar kind of
imperial corruption. In historian Arnold Toynbee’s two-volume
work, Hannibal’s Legacy, he argued that the period in which
Rome fought the three Punic Wars—an era during which Rome achieved
mastery of almost the entire Western Mediterranean—was ultimately
calamitous for Rome because it undermined Rome’s republican habits,
virtues, and character.
The
Roman people, Toynbee argued, especially the independent yeoman
farmers, were sent off for long periods to fight as legionaries in
places like Spain and Numidia (present day Libya). Their places were
taken by some two million slaves from conquered provinces who were
shipped back to Italy. Huge amounts of money extracted from conquered
lands poured into Italy and enriched an elite class, whose members
consolidated the farms of the soldiers who were fighting abroad and
forged them into large estates worked by slaves.
In
time the troops overseas—whose successes had been due to the
Italian virtues of hard work, independence, autonomy, and agrarianism
that one sees emphasized in Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics—became
accustomed to plunder. When Carthage finally fell in 146 B.C., its
population of 50,000 (down from 500,000) was enslaved, and the city
was razed to its foundations. That same year the Romans looted and
destroyed Corinth, the cultural capital of Greece.
The
Rome of Virgil, Catullus, the younger Cato, and Cicero was now busy
obliterating defeated cities that posed little threat to Rome’s
security. The success that made Rome an empire, Toynbee argued,
destroyed Rome by degrading the elements that made it great. Toynbee
may not have been right in every respect, but there are certainly
parts of his argument that ring true about corrupting the center
through incorporating the periphery or diluting a republic by
imperial ambitions.
This
might remind us also of Britain, whose empire probably reached its
peak sometime between 1850 and 1860. But if we read Charles
Dickens’ Bleak House, published in 1852, we see that at the
heart of the empire in London, there were vast numbers of people who
were in poor-houses at the same time the country was spending its
resources far and wide on its great imperial civilizing mission.
This
in turn might make us think of present day San Francisco, where
people are injecting themselves with drugs, fornicating, urinating,
and defecating on the streets, and downtown businesses are closing in
large numbers; or Chicago, where the murder and crime rates are
making life there unbearable for so many. Our major cities are going
to rot at the same time we are pledged to giving $120 billion to
Ukraine, already making its military budget the third largest in the
world.
And
the decay goes beyond the large cities. Think of those gruesome
scenes in East Palestine, Ohio, after the train crash that enveloped
the town in a toxic chemical cloud. East Palestine is full of
working-class people whom few of our establishment political leaders
were willing to go visit. The people of East Palestine form the
demographic that died at twice the numbers of the general population
in our overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet few in our
leadership class—many of whom had made one or more recent trips
around the world to Ukraine to visit the Ukrainian people and pose
for photos with Mr. Zelensky—went to East Palestine. I don’t know
if one can properly call the United States an imperialist power, but
this phenomenon of neglected and hollowed-out cores coupled with
widespread overseas investments and commitments tends to be
characteristic of empires.
Looking
outward, we can see two clear manifestations of imperialism today.
One is the Chinese brand of imperialism. China de facto now
controls 15 of the major ports in the world—ports that the Chinese
have leased, rebuilt, and refashioned. The Chinese are very
farsighted, so these ports are not just random acquisitions. They
control the Panama Canal. They monitor the entry into the
Mediterranean at Tangiers and the exit at Port Said. The two largest
ports in Europe, Antwerp and Rotterdam, are in the hands of the
Chinese, as are the artificial islands in the South China Sea, a
gateway for 50 percent of global oceanic traffic.
In
other words, the Chinese control 15 points at which, in a global
crisis, they will be able to shut off trade and access to commercial
goods, oil, and food, not to mention the influence they have gained
over local governments. China has also invested in concessions of
rare earth mining, oil, and other natural resources in Africa. And
due to the naive policies of the current U.S. administration, the
Chinese are developing very close ties not only with Iran, but also
with Saudi Arabia.
China
today is creating something very much like the British Empire,
although the Chinese are more like the imperialists of the Ottoman
Empire than those of the British, in that they are neither apologetic
nor shy about what they are doing. If the Chinese have an imperial
enclave in Africa, they rope it off and don’t allow Africans
nearby. Nor do they allow colonial peoples, for the most part, to go
to Beijing and be educated or integrated. Like the Ottomans who
conquered Constantinople in 1453, China has a monolithic culture and
makes no apologies for its ambition to be a global imperial power.
The
other imperial power we see on the rise today is more insidious.
George Orwell’s nightmare dystopia in 1984 was a world in
which there were no nation-states, but rather three powers wielding
absolute control over three land masses into which everyone had been
aggregated. Something like this is the dream of Klaus Schwab of the
World Economic Forum and his fellow globalists (many of them
American) who meet annually in Davos. Their vision is of a
transnational ruling class, consisting of elites drawn mostly from
the business, political, media, and academic worlds, with the power
to issue edicts on climate change, public health, diversity, human
rights, and even taxes, that override the will of national
majorities.
If
Chinese imperialism follows the tradition of the Ottoman Empire, the
globalist vision of Davos imperialism is in the tradition of utopian
empires gone astray. I think of Alexander the Great, who fought his
first great battle with the Persians in 334 B.C. at Granicus on the
coast of Asia Minor. When he died a decade later, he had probably
killed over two million people in creating what he envisioned as an
everlasting Hellenistic age based on an idea of the brotherhood of
man. Alexander never thought of himself as a mere killer. He was an
idealistic conqueror. And to this day, if you were to go to Greece
and criticize Alexander, you would earn a hostile reaction. Alexander
was an effective propagandist, as is the Davos crowd with their
argument that the totalitarian rule they want to impose is for our
benefit and the larger brotherhood of man.
Let me
close by saying that in 1897, Rudyard Kipling was asked to present a
poem at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, marking her 60th year as
queen. The British Empire, admittedly the most civilizing and humane
of any empire in history, was in full bloom—it had 420 million
people under its sway and covered 12 million square miles of
territory, seven times the area of the Roman Empire. Kipling
originally planned to present “The White Man’s Burden” at the
event, but he decided instead to present “Recessional,” a bleak
poem that includes this stanza: “Far-called, our navies melt away /
On dune and headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday /
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet /
Lest we forget—lest we forget!”
“Recessional”
is a poem of lamentation in which Kipling, known to be a great
supporter of the British Empire, seems to be warning that it is
destined to fail. Maybe he had been studying history.
adapted
from a talk delivered by Victor Davis Hanson on
June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise
