March 05, 2018
The Trap of Empire and Authoritarianism
For thousands of years the tragedy of politics has been that empire affords the answer to chaos. Imperialism, as the Oxford historian John Darwin says, “has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history,” as the capabilities needed to build strong states, owing to the patterns of geography, were never evenly distributed, so that one ethnic group usually emerged to rule the territory of others. Yet, because conquest leads to conceit, militarism, overextension, and bureaucratic calcification, the very act of building an empire indicates, in the view of German philosopher Oswald Spengler, decadence and cultural decline. Empires (especially those of Great Britain and France) were never so obvious as before their collapse.
Read the full article in The National Interest.
More from CNAS
-
Loren DeJonge Schulman on The Smell of Victory Podcast
Podcast
On The Smell of Victory Podcast, Bob Hein and Phil Walter sat down with Loren DeJonge Schulman of the Center for a New American Security to discuss the draft. Listen to the f...
By Loren DeJonge Schulman
-
Trump Gets NATO Backwards
Commentary
Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countr...
By Richard Fontaine
-
Amb. Nuland on N. Korea: The U.S. 'needs to get back into real diplomacy'
Video
Amb. Victoria Nuland, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and former Assistant Secretary of State, joins Ali Velshi to discuss reports that North Korea is moving ahe...
By Victoria Nuland
-
US midterm elections 2018: Democrats abroad in the Indo-Pacific
Commentary
A partial "blue wave" crested over the US House of Representatives this week, ushering in a Democratic majority there for the first time in eight years. With Republicans stren...
By Richard Fontaine
