My Empire Tis of Thee...

Review of Thomas F. Madden, "Empires of Trust" (New York: Dutton, 2008, $25.95; paperback, Plume Books, 2009, $17)

The French demographer Emmanuel Todd made quite a splash in 1976 when he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, basing his prediction on declining Soviet birth rates and other demographic factors. His prescience in regard to the Soviet Empire seems to have lent a great deal of credibility to his later works, including 2003's "After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order," which was much lauded in France before being alternately skewered and praised in the United States as visionary, racist, bold, anti-Semitic, epoch-making, and stupid. In it, Todd predicted that our country's reign as the world's sole superpower had a definite expiration date: Europe and Asia would get fed up with our swine-like overconsumption and form a consortium of right-minded nations to put us in our place. Neoconservatives and others took issue with this analysis, insisting that American global primacy was here to stay, a virtual given in the post-Cold War world. Charles Kupchan, a neocon of a different bent, argued in "The End of the American Era" (2002) that American primacy had seen better days, that George W. Bush's heavy-handed unilateralism was a very bad idea indeed, and that the United States had better get used to sharing the limelight with, especially, the European Union.

In retrospect, these don't seem unreasonable reactions to the Bush years, when the administration seemed to many observers to be burning every international bridge in sight, when the Muslim world appeared to have some good reasons to hate us, and when the British prime minister ran afoul of his electorate in supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But while all of this makes for a very interesting exchange, none of the participants -- despite their freehearted and perhaps ill-advised use of the word "empire" -- was primarily engaged in making an in-depth comparison between the United States and ancient Rome. Rather, they were concerned with analyzing America's current place in the world, with Rome serving as a convenient reference point. After all, we all know Roman history, don't we? We've seen "Spartacus" and HBO's "Rome," and various Charlton Heston movies; we know the bloated, dissolute empire that was brought to its weakened knees by barbarian invaders; we know the crazed emperors who sent Christians to their deaths in the Coliseum.

In truth, as Thomas F. Madden reminds us, we don't know Roman history at all, particularly the history of the early republic, many long years before Augustus Caesar became Rome's first emperor. In those early years, just after they had thrown off the shackles of Etruscan domination, the Romans were, well, a lot like us, says Madden: a simple, isolationist nation founded on agrarian principles and family values; because of Etruscan domination, horrified of crowned heads and authoritarian rule; suspicious of the larger world -- particularly the degenerate, effete, Greek-dominated Eastern Mediterranean -- and lured into its affairs only reluctantly. Despite its latter-day reputation, you see, Rome was not a rapacious, land-grabbing "Empire of Conquest," like Carthage or Persia; it was an "Empire of Trust," a behemoth whose borders expanded only because those living on those borders turned to Rome for help against mutual enemies. When it conquered a territory, says Madden, Rome turned it into a friend -- as the United States is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. These lesser states in turn disarmed, trusting Roman might to defend them, much as Western Europe trusts the United States to do the same.

If these parallels do not seem obvious to the lay reader, it's not for want of Madden's trying. His knowledge of Roman history is vast, and he regales us with it on every page, and in a prose style that tries so hard not to be scholarly that I feel as though I'm sitting in a freshman honors seminar led by Andy Rooney. He trots out example after example from pre-Empire Roman history, from the well-known (Pyrrhus, Hannibal) to the forgotten (Postumius, Flaminius) in an effort to create parallels between ancient Rome and the contemporary United States. As Madden reminds us in a rather smug preface, Americans -- including journalists, who "remind [him] very much of [his] undergraduates . . . tend to have limited exposure to history before the last century. And what they do know comes disproportionately from television and movies." The professor is bent on setting all of us undergrads aright, and I have no reason to doubt his grasp of Roman history. He banks on our ignorance; he counts on our thinking that the Roman Forum was peopled with Peter Ustinov, Stephen Boyd, and Jean Simmons.

A better-informed reading public would not, after all, allow him to do what he does to American history.

You see, though Madden promises us that he will not give us "another political screed that yanks bloody bits of Roman history out of context in order to make hackneyed partisan points," I can't help seeing something partisan in:

Athough more than two thousand years old, this strategy is now referred to as the "Doctrine of Preemption" or just simply the "Bush Doctrine." As in ancient Rome, it has attracted plenty of critics. Some accused President Bush of squandering the trust that America had gained in the world, acting as an emperor seeking foreign conquests rather than as a defender of freedom. Such criticisms are to be expected and, indeed, are evidence of the health of the Empire of Trust.

Nope, no partisanship there. Or in Madden's defense of the earlier President Bush who, according to Madden, "endured more than a decade of criticism for having failed to 'finish the job' [occupy Iraq], [though] his choice was consistent with the predictable, responsible, and measured use of power crucial for building an Empire of Trust."

We really must quit worrying, then, about those annoying wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: par for the course in an "Empire of Trust." Americans are blameless of power-grabbing and land-usurping; all was for the good of the conquered. Madden on the Spanish-American War: "American power was itself projected a short way across the sea in order to put an end to dangerous instability." Madden on the theft of the American continent from its original inhabitants (who receive two brief mentions in a book ostensibly about American empire-building): "Like the American version, Roman isolationism did not extend toward undeveloped tribal areas, which they saw as an opportunity for colonization and exploitation." Excuse me, professor, but -- undergraduate-minded TV-watcher though I be -- I can't help observing that (a) the Philippines is one HELL of a long way across the sea, and (b) wiser heads than mine have considered the great Native American civilizations of the pre-Columbian era something more than "undeveloped tribal areas."

Frankly, I don't understand the efficacy of comparing Rome to the United States in the first place. Should what happened in the pre-industrial, pre-technological past inform our political decisions today? Rome lasted 2,000 years, says Madden -- something of a whopper, calculated by figuring the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century A.D. as the "fall of Rome" -- so we have plenty of time before the Goths appear at our gates. Is that his point? God's in his heaven, all's right with the world? The Pax Americana is upon us, and we've earned it? I don't think I like this Rome very much, with Bush and Rumsfeld suckling at the she-wolf's teats. It makes me long for the Rome of gladiators and parties at Nero's.