Imperial Wars Always Come Home

I agree with the article's title but much less with its content, which seems to claim that returning imperial soldiers will always cause some sort of trouble for the (soon to be former) empire.

I think it's quite telling the author had to go back to the 15th century to find a historical precedent for his claim. Especially since the Hundred Years War could be described as many things (succession war, civil war...) but certainly not an imperial or colonial war. Why not take an example from the end of the British Empire, the French Empire or the Japanese Empire - all great colonial powers in the 20th century? Or Spain, Portugal and Netherlands before that? Because they are very few. I can only think of the loss of Algeria and the coup attempt by the French military in that context - but in the end that hardly destabilized the country.

The phenomenon is best explained the other way.

An imperial ruler losing a war, let alone an underhanded one, is most clear signal to Brutuses in waiting that the empire is weakened, demoralised, and it is "now, or never."

The later is the most important. The moment the emperor start to reconsolidate power, the first ones whose heads, or wallets he will reap will be them — nobles of uncertain loyalty, who usually thrive under such circumstances.

Almost as a rule, empires do not fall when their oppression peaks, but, after it, when they run out of steam to maintain pressure, and they are crushed by all old adversaries springing up at the same time.

It's odd to me, the need to over-complicate things like this. We've had escalating protests like this for 10+ years, plus recurring bursts over the last literal century. And the conclusion is... it's the Iraq war causing all this?

We had active, publicly-supported policies in place to militarize the police before Iraq and Afghanistan. The last civil rights movement included much more violent anti-protester crackdowns than Portland (Kent Stake & Selma come to mind, let alone the implicitly-supported KKK). Hell - who remembers the images from Ferguson 6 years ago?

Just because sh*t is going down doesn't mean it's the barbarian hordes marching on Rome. This has been going down for a WHILE. The president hasn't changed that.

The fatalism around America’s relative decline is so tiring to read about. Apparently the only thing that can occur is a sudden and disastrous collapse of Pax Americana, even though as shortly as 15-20 years ago America enjoyed total and complete hegemony over the rest of the world (militarily, economically, politically and culturally).

That period was a historical fluke, in my opinion. At no other time in human history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was, and to a certain extent continues to be. To assume that its relative decline can only continue and exacerbate and end in complete and utter disaster in our lifetimes reads to me as simplistic binary thinking.

Maybe I'm imposing my own, um, biases, onto the OC: methinks many of the replies here are wide of the mark.

It's pretty simple. The costs and consequences of war will be felt at home as well as abroad.

First, creating a weapon means it's more likely to be used. An underlying feared consequence of the military industrial complex is that the build up increases the potential for violence at the expense of diplomacy.

Second, the wages of war are paid by the people. Returning veterans discarded by the war machine. Families ravaged. PTSD, addiction, domestic violence, broken homes. Etc.

Third, everyone's keying off the title, is the chaos in the aftermath of war, every where. The OC gives a historical example. This story is as old as humanity. I have nothing new to add here, but will note that some tried to mitigate these effects with stuff the League of Nations & United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and so forth. Stabilizing institutions which have been under continuous attack, from before they were even enacted.

Those who ignore history are fated to repeat it, cliche, blah blah blah.

A related insightful take by Jacob Levy (an important political theorist) on the capacity of border lawlessness to undermine the rule of law at home: https://www.niskanencenter.org/law-and-border/

This completely off topic but the author has a long and detailed podcast series on the fall of the roman empire.

https://wondery.com/shows/the-fall-of-rome-podcast/

I think there is a simpler explanation for the fall of empires: They are built on assumptions about the world in which they are founded, and they come with coping-mechanisms to deal with the kinds of problems that their founders expect them to face, based on their own experiences and their understanding about what went wrong in previous empires. In this way they are like a code base, built to be easy to extend in the ways where extension is expected, but rigid in the directions where it is not. But the world changes, and eventually it will change in ways the founders could not have predicted, and which the empire is incapable of fully adapting to. Not only that, but as the empire grows, power is concentrated in its midst, so it becomes more and more lucrative to game the system, to find ways of exploiting the rules and institutions of the empire to gain access to this accumulation of power. (In startups this is similar to when the MBAs start running the company and all the creative people leave). These adversarial attacks further break down the coping mechanisms that were supposed to help the empire adapt to a changing world. It leads to consolidation and inflexibility. And as the center of power increasingly attracts those with no interest in the sustainability and well-being of the empire, unrest increases as the common man loses faith in the empire, and its ability to deal with the issues of today. The empire is now in crisis, and it will either adapt through a massive change (a civil war that is swiftly resolved, a 'New Deal' or similar) that 'resets' its alignment, and makes it capable of change in new needed directions (not unlike a pivot in startup parlance), or it will fall apart (typically through a civil war that never really ends).

The US has managed to survive several such crises (e.g. the Civil War and the Depression) but there are many ways in which the coping mechanisms that its founders created have been hamstrung. The 2nd amendment made perfect sense when the biggest perceived risk to the wellbeing of your citizens was a foreign tyrant occupying their land - but today it is far, far more likely that you will be shot by your neighbor. Guaranteeing free speech makes perfect sense, but the founders never predicted a world of multimedia broadcast, where the person or company with the most money can drown out the speech of everyone else. Letting everyone be free to pursue happiness on their own is a great principle, but it never predicted a world where people and corporations could be rich enough to suppress social mobility as much as an aristocracy does. The three branches of government were supposed to provide checks and balances on each other, but this breaks down when massive partisan polarization puts the executive and legislative branch in bed with each other, and they join forces to appoint politically motivated judges. The electoral collage, a mechanism that was supposed to prevent the majority from ignoring the will of the minority instead became a tool for the minority to ignore the will of the majority. The list is long.

As an outside observer, I really hope the US can pull through its current crisis (the world could do with fewer empires, but I don't particulalarly want the stage to be left for China or Russia instead). But as far as I can tell, it requires not only that the US changes, but also that it changes the ways in which it can change. That's a tall order considering the current state of affairs.

This phenomenon was also described by Foucault, and is now usually called Foucault's Boomerang[0]:

"It should never be forgotten", Foucault said, "that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”

On a practical note there isn't anything mystical or karmic about this. If you have a bunch of people with experience acting in a certain way in an overseas setting, and then those same people come back to positions of power in a domestic setting, they're going to act according to their past experience. If you have a surplus of weapons, armor, and vehicles developed for overseas engagements being given out to domestic police forces, they will be used according to their design.

Sometimes the link is even direct and explicit: Israel trains American police forces in tactics they've developed in Palestine[1].

[0] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/foucaults-boom...

[1] https://progressive.org/dispatches/us-police-trained-by-isra...

Empires fall. Always. Good riddance. Either fall or transition into a normal state. Quit wasting time imperializing.

First comment is good:

Always appreciate your insights Patrick, but you are completely off base here. USA has far fewer working age combat veterans now than it did in the 1950s through 1980s, and violence isn't anywhere near the levels that pervaded American society from the late 1960s through early 1990s. Trump's harshly criticized immigration policy is quite tame - compare it to the mass deportations under Roosevelt and Eisenhower.

The scenes in Portland and elsewhere are completely understandable - organized black clad rioters are attacking federal buildings. Is the government supposed to let them storm the buildings? No government would allow such a thing to happen, though perhaps the USA will.

America is a dying country, her people destined to be a small & hated minority surrounded by masses of her former subjects. Your own state legislature even recently voted to legalize discrimination against people like you (Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 5).

>When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that’s empire coming home.

The federal agents in Portland are using technology to reduce harm. Over 50 nights they have had mobs trying to come in and destroy a federal courthouse, but instead of reenacting the Boston Massacre, at worst there has been non-life threatening injuries.

Empires and countries grow weak when they divide against themselves. This is obvious, and the main way power structures fall apart. Articles like this are trying to further this division by suggesting that trying to keep a mob from destroying courthouses is authoritarian. Would Putin be so patient as to allow mobs to lay siege to a courthouse for 50 days?

It's unbelievable how hyperbolic the rhetoric has gotten on this issue. My guess is that people like the author are not actually seeing what's happening in Portland. He's seeing what the federal agents are doing, but not what the mob does to provoke these responses. I won't go so far as to say the city is burning down, but if the federal agents left the courthouse to the mob, it would be burned to the ground that very day.

> Empire is a spectrum or a continuum, not an either/or proposition, and it’s a little bit like the old saying about pornography: You know it when you see it. The United States is an empire, and nobody who works seriously on the subject of empire would be likely to argue otherwise.

What does "empire" mean? I thought it meant "a group of nations or peoples ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign or government" (from dictionary.com) but clearly he's not using it in this fashion. Is it now another word for hegemon?

If the concept of empire is a spectrum would that mean the US is a very large but relatively very weak empire, as it exerts a lot of influence but little direct control over a lot of its "territory" in the style of other past empires? Does that mean Luxembourg is an empire now, but only at a very very low level of empire?

I guess there's Puerto Rico (and maybe more like that?) – but I don't think this is the sense he means it.

He talks about global military bases making an empire: as both the US and UK have bases in Germany and Bahrain, does that mean that Germany and Bahrain are both part of overlapping US and UK empires? Empires can overlap? Or is the UK too weak and powerless to make an empire - and that means there's now no such thing as a small empire? Does empire just mean "Very powerful and influential country"?

Before I read this article I thought I knew what an empire was and would know it when I see it – now I feel have no idea what an empire is...

I don't mind changing the meanings of words when it makes them more useful - what specific concept beyond "Very powerful and influential" does "empire" now identify?