From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses

Guest Post by Batiushka

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest….Instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long. – History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon

Introduction: Imperial Failures

Empires in terminal decline, like the American today, go from one usually military disaster to another. ‘Might is Right’, is the old dictum they wrongly believe in. It happened to the Roman, as described above. It happened to the British, starting with the Boer War, then the bankrupting Pyrrhic victories in two World Wars and ending with the Suez humiliation in 1956. And the French with their World Wars and Indo-China and then Algerian debacle. It happened to the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan, though its failure was more about its failure to deliver on its promises to consumers because it could not finance debt like Western countries. Imperial failure is always a frightening phenomenon.

After catastrophic failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US Empire has now chosen to bet everything on someone else’s country in Europe. This is the big one, not a war against sandal-wearing tribesmen, but against a Superpower with a professional army and the best rocket artillery, drones and hypersonic missiles in the world. This was is in the south-western borderland backwaters of Russia, called the Ukraine. Having lost its attempt to occupy the naval port of Sevastopol in the Crimea and so control the Black Sea, the US aggressor-state has turned the Ukraine into yet another failed attempt to try and impose its global hegemony. At present, attention is focused on a town called Bakhmut in south-eastern Ukraine…...more here

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