America is the new Rome

In the legendary HBO series The Sopranos, a Hasidic Jew, being beaten for not paying up, refers to Masada, where a handful of Jewish zealots kept an entire Roman legion at bay for years. ‘Where are the Romans now?’, he asked. Tony Soprano’s response: ‘You’re looking at them, asshole.’

Like the Mafia, Americans are hardly reluctant to apply force against opponents. As we see in Iran, even a bully can prove a civilisational necessity when confronted with existential threats. At a time when most democracies have become cream puffs, there remains a need for an authoritative force, which right now only America and Israel seem willing and able to apply.

How the current conflict in Iran ends up is far from certain, but something had to be done about the Islamic Republic. The world’s primary exporter of terrorism was on the verge of being able to deliver nuclear-tipped missiles over long distances. Nothing was going to stop them – not the EU, much less the United Nations. Britain, which can barely defend its bases in Cyprus, has not proved of much consequence.

The US’s use of force has led one establishment commentator to label America a ‘predatory hegemon’, much as Rome was in its heyday. It is certainly not fashionable to sing the praises of empire, but perhaps, given the nature of things, an imperial power can sometimes be the best guarantor of economic security, order and growth. In the period of the republic, and then the empire, the Romans built the walls, roads and aqueducts that enabled a remarkable expansion of trade in goods and ideas, including Christianity. The Romans also swept the Mediterranean of pirates and fended off nomadic forces, serving as guarantors of ancient civilisation. Later, when the imperial barriers came down, the transportation networks that had brought prosperity collapsed, while repeated incursions by new peoples drove the West into a prolonged dark age.

Europe’s leaders, even right-wing politicians such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, clearly lack the will to defend their own countries. Much of the intelligentsia prefers to attack America even as Iran sends agents to kill their fellow citizens and hurls missiles at their possessions. Europe is devolving into what the Greeks were to the Romans: a source of cultural inspiration, but of little consequence in terms of power. Rome, after all, had easily steamrollered the Greeks by 146 BC.

For two centuries, Britain – America’s colonial forebear – played much the same role as the Romans, assuring freedom of the seas and curtailing ambitious rivals such as France and later Germany. But Britain is a shadow of its former self, with a navy unable to fulfil the most basic defensive role. The former imperial power has been defanged by multiculturalism, coupled with a radical green agenda.

Europe’s fragility has been particularly evident since the fall of the USSR. It has eschewed military strength in favour of what one observer describes as ‘the delusion of soft power and woke diplomacy’. European leaders seem to regard the winning of the Cold War as a triumph of their beloved rules-based order, but it was ultimately America’s raw power – financial, technological, cultural – that won it.

One wonders what the likes of Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron could do to stop the messianic mullahs and their Islamist terrorist agenda. They increasingly do not matter much in any case. Today, China is America’s only real rival – just as in the third century, when the Middle Kingdom and Rome dominated much of the world’s population. India may achieve superpower status in the longer term, but no one is likely to overshadow the US in the coming decade.

China is in many ways as different from the US as it was in Roman times. Then, as now, China is largely an inward-looking country dominated by a single ethnicity. It can be efficient and even brilliant, but lacks the transnational appeal of Rome, much less the global reach and dynamism of an increasingly diverse America. Across the world, we see the growing dominance of English, American music and the ubiquitous New York Yankees cap on young people in cities from Rome to Seoul.

As with the Romans, military power lies at the core of this empire, as demonstrated by the ability to devastate national foes such as Iraq and now Iran. Almost alone in the Western world, America still possesses a home-grown warrior class, drawn mainly from the South and heartland regions – the modern-day equivalent of Rome’s small landowners, or the working and upper-class men who staffed Britain’s powerful navy.

Then as now, money counts as much as firepower and military ferocity. America, once seen as threatened by Europe and Japan, now dominates the globe more comprehensively than at any point in the past century. From 2008 to 2023, US GDP grew from roughly equal to the EU’s to a full third larger. US GDP growth is more than four times that of the UK.

A key advantage today is that, after decades of energy vulnerability, the US has emerged as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. This gives Trump room for manoeuvre. Whatever happens next in the war, the US could, if Trump wished, simply withdraw from the Gulf and leave its oil to the tender mercies of the Iranians.

Europe, meanwhile, has systematically undermined its own energy production. Faced with the spectre of further deindustrialisation and social unrest, its leaders may feel obliged to kowtow to whatever Revolutionary Guardsmen survive, begging for their energy fix.

The US also controls the majority of the world’s financial assets, even as China surges and both Europe and Japan lose ground. America’s most powerful instruments of dominance are the tech giants. Companies such as Apple are worth more than the entire economies of Mexico, Brazil, Russia or Canada. In AI, the US is dominant and meaningfully challenged only by China.

Critically, US predominance also extends to the space industry, which will be a defining force in the future. Europe talks a good game but produces little compared with NASA, SpaceX or the constellation of entrepreneurial space ventures springing up in places such as El Segundo and Long Beach in California, as well as across Texas, Alabama and Florida. Overall, the US has a larger space industry than the rest of the world combined. Were the Romans around today, they too would look to conquer the stars.

Perhaps the biggest difference between America and its allies, including Italy, lies in attitude. Americans still embrace Judaeo-Christianity – itself largely a product of Europe – far more than those on the continent. Americans are three times more likely to regard their country as the best in the world than people in the UK, and eight times more likely to hold that view than citizens of France or Germany.

Another sometimes overlooked advantage lies in the post-racial nature of American nationalism. Unlike the nativist Greeks, the Romans thrived by incorporating others into their civilisation. Pride in America is widely shared across ethnic lines: African Americans are a major force in the military, while Latinos, the largest minority group, constitute the fastest-growing segment of both the active-duty military and local police forces.

This ability to meld cultures echoes some quintessential Roman virtues. The republic grew in large part by incorporating neighbouring peoples and making them citizens. By 212 AD, all freemen in the Roman Empire had gained citizenship.

Sadly, the rise of empires – whether in Rome or the US – threatens some of the virtues nurtured in the republic. But modern America is a far cry from embracing one-man rule. Trump may like to wield power like a CEO and speak of the need for a ‘dictator’, but he could yet be hemmed in by Congress should the Democrats gain control of one or both houses. He will not be able to legislate freely and will have to contend with an opposition united chiefly by disdain for anything he does, including in Iran.

Some progressives even dream of the US being humiliated in the current conflict, much as occurred during Crassus’s ill-fated expedition to Parthia – today’s Iran – in 53 BC. But Trump’s power is also held in check by conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court. The founding fathers, acutely aware of the Roman Republic’s demise, built circuit breakers to limit aspiring despots from accumulating undue power.

The danger of expanding executive power remains real. In Rome, as the empire grew, the senate became deeply dysfunctional and dominated by partisan rivalry. As legislative resolve weakened, the consuls became increasingly powerful until Augustus became the first emperor.

American presidents, too, have come to wield enormous discretionary power – imposing tariffs, waging war and, under President Obama, using executive orders to push sweeping policies on climate change and race relations.

Concentrating power in the executive carries clear risks, as the reigns of Caligula, Nero and a host of other unhinged emperors demonstrate. Enormous power in the hands of the mercurial and narcissistic Trump is far from reassuring. His attempt – unauthorised by Congress and lacking broad public support – to needlessly alienate traditional allies such as Canada and Denmark smacks of a kind of executive overreach.

Perhaps more critically, as in Rome, class divisions also threaten the republican constitution. Conflicts between patricians and plebeians divided the Romans, most famously from the time of the Gracchi in the first and second century BC. The growing power of slaves – much like artificial intelligence today – threatened and then eroded the economic prospects of ordinary Romans, turning them into a mob dependent on panem et circenses: bread and circuses.

The true test of any empire lies in how it benefits its citizens. Rome flourished not only through military power but through its roads, aqueducts, sanitation and open sea lanes, which promoted widespread prosperity and generated surplus funds for the unemployed. The American empire cannot flourish if a large part of its population is left destitute.

Finally, any imperial order requires a clear rationale to sustain itself. Despite its endemic bouts of brutality, Rome’s civilisational ideal – as Gibbon observed – turned the descendants of Gauls, Britons and Syrians into members of an advanced and resilient order. Even Roman emperors increasingly came not from Italy but from Spain, North Africa and eastern Europe. Even the Jews, their capital destroyed and their people scattered, played a vital role, including as incubators of Christianity.

Today, the American empire, for all its glaring weaknesses, remains as necessary as Rome was in its time. It often needs to limit its expansion – as the Romans did first under Augustus and later Hadrian, consolidating their holdings while conceding territory to the barbarians of northern Europe and, of course, to the Persians (some things never change). Britain thrived even as it was forced to give up much of its North American colonial empire, and decided wisely not to try incorporating Afghanistan – that heartland of relentless violence – into its own. America, too, may preserve itself by limiting its ambitions: focussing more on the Americas, reducing commitments in the perennially unstable Middle East, and – most consequentially of all – gradually leaving Europe to its own defencelessness.

Whatever the outcome of the present conflict, only the US has a ‘security surplus’ that allows it to project power globally and remains the only power that can counter brutal dictatorships such as those in Iran, China and Russia. These powers understand that the rules-based order means very little if not backed by force.

You can complain all you want about American arrogance and brutishness, and about the odious vulgarian Trump, whose failure to define the Iran mission has undoubtedly weakened support for it at home. But in the end, only the American empire can keep trade lanes open, control nuclear proliferation and confront other threats to Western civilisation. Empires contract and fall, of course – but for now, the American one still reigns supreme, and on balance, we are better off for it.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute. Find him on Substack here.