America, Rome, and military expenditures

16. January 2012 by admin.

Perhaps one of the most striking features of the Roman Empire, as noted by countless historians, is the amount of time in which it maintained nearly total supremacy over such a vast portion of the human race.  Edward Gibbon, in his historical masterpiece The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, notes not only that the greatest conquests of the Romans were made under its Republican government (which may seem strange to Westerners, in light of recent unrealistically peaceful portrayals of representative democracy), but that the Romans were able to maintain consecutive annexations not for one, nor two, nor even three, but for seven centuries.  No empire in modern history is anywhere near comparable: the English and French Empires, after establishing great dominions for only a short while, have been pressured into emancipating those territories into self-government.  And the American empire (if it can be called such), while making the greatest military expenditures and displays in all of history, and exerting immense influence across not just portions of the globe, but across the entirity of it, has little beyond its own continental borders to claim as American territory, or even vassal states. Read the rest of this entry »

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