Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
exposed over the past decade was the overstretch of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, busy
trying to tamp down rebellions in far corners of the earth. America must, therefore, contem-
plate a grand strategy that seeks to restore its position from something akin to Rome's third
system to its second; or to its first. While America does not have client states, it does have
allies and like-minded others, whom it needs to impress in order to make them more ef-
fective on its behalf. America can do that best through an active diplomacy and the buildup
of a reserve of troops, used sparingly, so as to restore its surge capacity, of the kind Rome
enjoyed under the original Julio-Claudian system. Rome's very longevity proved its grand
strategy a success, and yet its ultimate decline and tumultuous fall in Western Europe was
due to a failure to adapt to the formation of new national groupings to its north that would
provide the outlines of modern European states. Because of these formations, the Roman
Empire was headed for extinction in any case. But it need not have happened as soon as it
did, and in the way that it did.
Rome's real failure in its final phase of grand strategy was that it did not provide a mech-
anism for a graceful retreat, even as it rotted from within. But it is precisely—and coun-
terintuitively—by planning for such a deft exit from a hegemony of sorts that a state or
empire can actually prolong its position of strength. There is nothing healthier for America
than to prepare the world for its own obsolescence. That way it labors for a purpose, and
not merely to enjoy power for its own sake.
How does America prepare itself for a prolonged and graceful exit from history as a dom-
inant power? Like Byzantium, it can avoid costly interventions, use diplomacy to sabotage
back to Bacevich—make sure it is not undermined from the south the way Rome was from
the north. America is bordered by oceans to the east and west, and to the north by the Cana-
dian Arctic, which provides for only a thin band of middle-class population on America's
border. (The American-Canadian frontier is the most extraordinary of the world's fronti-
where America is vulnerable. Here is the one area where America's national and imperial
boundaries are in some tension: where the coherence of America as a geographically cohes-
broad and indistinct, much like that of the Indian Subcontinent in the northwest, even as it
reveals civilizational stresses. Stanford historian David Kennedy notes, “The income gap
between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries
in the world,” with American GDP nine times that of Mexico.
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America's foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its society, and noth-
ing will affect its society more than the dramatic movement of Latin history northward.
