Roman America or failed empire or something else?

The Boston Globe reviewed Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of Americaby Cullen Murphy on July 1. C-Span's BookTV has shown the author and the book sounds interesting enough to pick up. (By the way, BookTV works quite well in getting the kids away from the television.)

"Are We Rome?" is a provocative book title. All the more so when the average pleb in the street fears he's witnessing the disintegration of a civilization and moral order 2,000 years in the making. "Are We Rome?" is not a strict historical treatise answering this question. It is a graceful examination of parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, Toronto Star publishes As the eagle falters, the dragon swoops with its own reference to America as Rome.

We ate noodles in a lantern-lit alleyway, talked politics and fought for the bill. Our conversation on the way home veered toward impressions of various nationalities.

Outside his apartment, we paused beneath an awning. I asked, "Carlos, what do you think the difference is between Canada and America?" He stopped, key in door, and replied softly: "America is arrogant."

Chinese students like Carlos – not to mention those who raised pro-democracy banners in Tiananmen Square – once looked to America's ideals with hope. No longer, it seems. His youthful answer is not out of place in China now, nor would it be unexpected around the world.

If America is a sort of new Rome – spreading civilization like Rudyard Kipling would have wanted – it now rules over a world of smoking, pseudo-colonial ruins, tattered sovereignty and post-Cold War hatreds. To many, it wreaks havoc not in the name of democracy and liberty, but of free markets and hubris.

Overwhelmingly, analysts predict the new power will be Beijing, which rules already over 32 country-sized, linguistically distinct provinces, autonomous zones and city-states.

Meanwhile, Scotland's Sunday Herald starts China booms … we pay the price with these paragraphs:

ALL OF those cheaply produced goods from China-everything from Nike running shoes to electric kettles - are coming home to roost right here in Britain. As factories multiply there to satisfy the Western world's insatiable demand for consumer goods, they use ever-increasing volumes of fuel.

The result is a coming oil crunch that will force up the price of fuel for cars, trains and planes, for home heating, for our own (diminishing) stock of factories and even the cost of money in the form of interest rates.

Judging by the latest figures from a variety of sources, those who think a quid a gallon at the pump makes motoring more of a luxury than a necessity ain't seen nothing yet.

And of imperialism, The Sunday Herald published a feature on historian Michael Hobsbawm with these paragraphs:

He simply can't get to grips with the Iraq war, because it doesn't seem to have been in America's economic or strategic interests. It was an impetuous departure from the very successful neo-imperialist strategy of post-cold war America. The US didn't need to dominate the world by force of arms because it dominated through force of economic and technological superiority.

"Frankly, I can't make sense of what has happened in the US since 9/11," says Hobsbawm,"it enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy."

(Is therein a damning line towards what is wrong with the Bushies - did they need to prove their manliness by force of arms or were they just a bunch of political loonies without the sense to know the damage they were unleashing or both?)

Which brings us back to the Toronto Star article and what appears the source of our imperial decline, George W. Bush:

In Africa, a continent wooed intensely by Chinese officials, the U.S. has likewise soiled its reputation to China's benefit. America even threatened poor, famished Niger with sanctions when it tried to support the International Criminal Court, which the U.S. opposes.

Finally, The Sunday Herald editorializes about the change in British foreign policy in terms of separation from Bush:

After five years of US-dominated war planning in Iraq, with Tony Blair widely regarded as a subservient poodle to George W Bush's White House inner sanctum, the relationship between the new UK prime minister and US president was never going to be anything else but fluid. What is clear, however, even in the fog of recent speeches from two of his ministers, is that Brown won't be Blair. This is good and long let it be so.

The first hint of substantial change came with the speech in Washington DC by the international development secretary, Douglas Alexander. One of Brown's closest allies in the Cabinet, Alexander is a loyal servant, routinely circumspect with his words and careful not to upset his master.

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He told the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington that isolationism simply "does not work in an interdependent world", and that while a country's might was measured in the 20th century by what it could destroy, we were now in a different time, when strength should be measured by "what we can build together". Alexander subsequently talked of new alliances based on common values which "reach out to the world".

The message was clear: Bush's US neocon fantasy of a New American century, based on liberal interventionism and pre-emption linked to the spread of US-style democracy, was dead in the water and the new British prime minister wanted Bush to know Britain would be doing business differently from now on. Congress has been telling the White House something similar for months, and Alexander's tone wouldn't have come as a shock. In fact, it would have been interpreted as a show of solidarity by the Democrats and by some Republicans who have had enough of Bush's stance on Iraq and the Middle East.