Semper ubi sub ubi

Maureen Dowd asserts that America is following in the downward footsteps of the Roman Empire. The writing may be silly, but the thesis is all too common. More sober forecasters see in our weakness echoes of the British Empire a century ago. The idea is that those great empires declined and fell, and so will we.

Pardon me if I disagree...

The key difference between America and those empires of yore is that, despite the pretensious babbling of Bush administration officials, America is not an empire. It's a nation.

The Roman Empire consisted mainly of Italian people ruling over vastly larger numbers of non-Italians. The British Empire consisted of a few British people ruling over vastly larger numbers of Indians, Africans, Canadians, Australians, Southeast Asians, and Arabs. The United States consists of 300 million Americans ruling over...who? Iraqis? Yeah, right.

Suppose American power declines. American military and economic power is reduced to a shadow of its former self. We abandon our far-flung network of bases and stop interfering in other countries' affairs. What happens then? We still have exactly the same number of people and exactly the same amount of land. And it would take a big decline indeed to make this country so poor that immigrants no longer want to come here. So with the land and the people and all the technology we have now (technology is knowledge, it doesn't go away as long as somebody has a hard disk), what would be permanently stopping us from retooling our institutions and restarting our economic engine?

A better comparison for America might be China. China has periodically collapsed in the past - even been divided for long periods of time - but it has always come back together, because a divided China just makes less economic sense than a unified one. And when it reunites, China always pops back up to become a great power. Why should we expect America to be any different?