There is a reason why the idea of bipolarity may be vigorously dismissed as unnecessary and defeatist, in so far as America’s hegemonic dream is concerned. Once upon a time in history, there was a viable and mighty Pax Romana, many will say, and, in fact, have been saying all the time, so what is wrong with having a Pax Americana rule the world, for a change? Pax Romana was in place for hundreds of years, Pax Americana is a clearly superior international arrangement, and it can stay in place for a good thousand years, now that the blight of Soviet communism has been removed from the face of this planet…
What’s wrong with this line of thinking? Great empires have indeed existed throughout human history. They rose and fell, and here is the first snag in the Pax Romana--Pax Americana logic. There are many people in the world today, no friends of the United States, who are very anxious to cite the parallel, but with their own spin on it. Their logic is that all great empires had been doomed from the start. Alexander the Great built an uncontested empire, which collapsed on the day of his death. So did Charlemagne’s empire’ later on. There were also other great empires built by their founding geniuses. Genghis Khan’s broke into pieces right away after his death, just like Alexander’s, and other such examples are a few. (Such empires as Napoleon’s, and, perhaps, Hitler’s Third Reich, were contested from the very beginning and collapsed even before the demise of their respective founders.)
We cannot talk about the “stability” of an empire built on the laurels of its founder and destroyed as soon as those laurels had faded. It reminds me of a big rock hurled into the air by the powerful arm of a prodigious athlete and sustained by that propelling force until the natural forces of friction and gravity must inevitably bring it down.
Getting back now to the Roman Empire of the Pax Romana fame, its historical reality was less glorious than its legend. I don’t think that, digging up all historical facts, the idea of the United States somehow emulating the Romans in our modern age would look just as charming in the eyes of its proponents as it appears on the most superficial level of the Pax Romana--Pax Americana parallel. Built on military strength and nonstop warfare, the Roman Empire relied culturally on foreign (Greek) wisdom, and during its maturity, it relied on foreign mercenaries in most of its military and security matters, leading to disastrous results. Besides, the sheer weight of its colossal bulk could not be sustained, leading to its split into Western and Eastern Roman Empires, with its crowning jurisprudential achievement, the Codex Justinianus, coming not out of Rome but out of Constantinople!
But the key argument against the parallel of Pax Romana--Pax Americana can be gleaned from the famous book Russia and Europe, written in 1869 by the Russian political thinker Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky, a botanist by profession, who saw the series of coming and going civilizations as biological cycles in nature. Great Empires, like flowers, bloom, blossom, and then fade, leaving the field to later bloomers. He saw the British Empire as a bloomer soon to fade, and believed that the future belonged to Russia. What he said of the British Empire and of the preceding civilizations, however, could be just as easily applied to the United States, which taints this whole line of thinking, and ought to prompt the apologists of the American Empire to start looking for other arguments in support of their Imperial claim.
I am not making an argument here, however, for an imminent demise of the American Empire of the twenty-first century, as my principal thrust is toward the validation of the bipolarity principle. Promoting my thesis, I seek support not from Danilevsky, who, in my opinion, brilliantly exposes the downside of the hegemony quest by a single superpower, but from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose vision of the rise of two superpowers, America and Russia, testifies in defense of my bipolarity principle.
In a nutshell, as long as the hegemony principle is withdrawn and the bipolarity principle has been properly recognized and acknowledged, the American Empire has nothing to fear. What it has to fear though, is the current geopolitical ambiguity, where the "antithesis" to America unquestionably exists, but it has not been properly identified. Against such an "antithesis," the American Empire stands no chance.
...This discussion continues in my next entry The Two Superpowers.
What’s wrong with this line of thinking? Great empires have indeed existed throughout human history. They rose and fell, and here is the first snag in the Pax Romana--Pax Americana logic. There are many people in the world today, no friends of the United States, who are very anxious to cite the parallel, but with their own spin on it. Their logic is that all great empires had been doomed from the start. Alexander the Great built an uncontested empire, which collapsed on the day of his death. So did Charlemagne’s empire’ later on. There were also other great empires built by their founding geniuses. Genghis Khan’s broke into pieces right away after his death, just like Alexander’s, and other such examples are a few. (Such empires as Napoleon’s, and, perhaps, Hitler’s Third Reich, were contested from the very beginning and collapsed even before the demise of their respective founders.)
We cannot talk about the “stability” of an empire built on the laurels of its founder and destroyed as soon as those laurels had faded. It reminds me of a big rock hurled into the air by the powerful arm of a prodigious athlete and sustained by that propelling force until the natural forces of friction and gravity must inevitably bring it down.
Getting back now to the Roman Empire of the Pax Romana fame, its historical reality was less glorious than its legend. I don’t think that, digging up all historical facts, the idea of the United States somehow emulating the Romans in our modern age would look just as charming in the eyes of its proponents as it appears on the most superficial level of the Pax Romana--Pax Americana parallel. Built on military strength and nonstop warfare, the Roman Empire relied culturally on foreign (Greek) wisdom, and during its maturity, it relied on foreign mercenaries in most of its military and security matters, leading to disastrous results. Besides, the sheer weight of its colossal bulk could not be sustained, leading to its split into Western and Eastern Roman Empires, with its crowning jurisprudential achievement, the Codex Justinianus, coming not out of Rome but out of Constantinople!
But the key argument against the parallel of Pax Romana--Pax Americana can be gleaned from the famous book Russia and Europe, written in 1869 by the Russian political thinker Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky, a botanist by profession, who saw the series of coming and going civilizations as biological cycles in nature. Great Empires, like flowers, bloom, blossom, and then fade, leaving the field to later bloomers. He saw the British Empire as a bloomer soon to fade, and believed that the future belonged to Russia. What he said of the British Empire and of the preceding civilizations, however, could be just as easily applied to the United States, which taints this whole line of thinking, and ought to prompt the apologists of the American Empire to start looking for other arguments in support of their Imperial claim.
I am not making an argument here, however, for an imminent demise of the American Empire of the twenty-first century, as my principal thrust is toward the validation of the bipolarity principle. Promoting my thesis, I seek support not from Danilevsky, who, in my opinion, brilliantly exposes the downside of the hegemony quest by a single superpower, but from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose vision of the rise of two superpowers, America and Russia, testifies in defense of my bipolarity principle.
In a nutshell, as long as the hegemony principle is withdrawn and the bipolarity principle has been properly recognized and acknowledged, the American Empire has nothing to fear. What it has to fear though, is the current geopolitical ambiguity, where the "antithesis" to America unquestionably exists, but it has not been properly identified. Against such an "antithesis," the American Empire stands no chance.
...This discussion continues in my next entry The Two Superpowers.
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