"How Rome fell and the Moral for the USA"

Here's a short article on the book of the above name with links:

"I've been reading with great interest Adrian Goldsworthy's new book, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. It's an instructive tale of how the Roman Empire's failure to develop a succession process with social legitimacy led to a series of debilitating civil wars, which left the empire too weak to fend off outsiders. The conclusion draws some obvious parallels with the fate of subsequent empires, including the British and American:

"Nothing suggests that the United States must inevitably decline and cease to be a superpower in the near future. ... This certainly does not mean that America can afford to be complacent.

"The Roman experience suggests that imperial decline is likely to start at the top.
All of which calls to mind Barack Obama's twin policies of expanding bureaucracy and apologizing to the world for American hegemony. As Dorothy Rabinowitz observes:
He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.
No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle.

"None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him."

Read the rest of the short post with a link for the book:

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2009/04/how-rome-fell-and-the-moral-for-the-usa.html