THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array included such fanciful causes as Bolshevism, public baths, hedonism, the pressure of terrorism and, most famously, lead poisoning.
The last explanation has been discredited. It is highly unlikely that lead water pipes caused the empire to collapse in a tumult of brain damage, gout and madness. Yet exploded theories can point towards important truths. Like classical Rome, America’s empire today depends less on pomp than on plumbing. Instead of roads, aqueducts and seaports, it relies on pipelines conveying financial flows and torrents of data, as well as vast distributed supply chains. These look like a global public infrastructure, but can readily be redirected to private national strategic advantage. America’s domination of obscure, seeming technical structures is generating its own forms of hubristic folly among imperial administrators, who have begun to think that there is nothing they cannot do with it.
Far beneath the boastful speeches, petty insults and spiteful feuds; the fights over NATO and Russian influence operations; the subterranean conduits of empire are failing. If America’s empire is indeed headed towards expiry, many future historians will blame the obvious problems: the rise of China, overextension in the Middle East, the defection of allies. Yet some might trace the beginnings of decay back to two more quotidian crises: America’s botched decision to sanction the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corporation, and Europe’s creation of an apparently innocuous technical arrangement—the “Special Purpose Vehicle”—purportedly to facilitate humanitarian exchange with Iran.
TO CHART the empires of antiquity you simply mapped the cities, rivers and roads through which power flowed. Today’s international economy has a far more complex topography that encompasses both the physical and the digital. Crucial resources—money, information and components—pass through an intricate global tangle of conduits. These started to coalesce into their current configuration a quarter of a century ago, at a moment when the world economy appeared to be secure from empire’s grasp.
The early 1990s seemed the beginning of a new and simpler world where the law of kings had been displaced by the lex mercatoria. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states created a temporary delirium of liberalism, in which it appeared that bitter international disputes over the ordering of the economy were giving way to the complete victory of the free market. The historian Quinn Slobodian describes how neoliberals had long desired the victory of “dominium”—a global order based on property rights, free global and national exchange—over “imperium”—the power of national states to control property, block financial flows, and harness markets for strategic ends. In the 1990s, it appeared that imperium was being beaten back inside the bounds of national borders. States found themselves increasingly unable to interfere with business investments for fear of capital flight. As national power retreated, a new global order of easy trade and financial and intellectual exchange took its place, underpinned by multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization.
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “America’s Misuse of Its Financial Infrastructure,” The National Interest, May/June 2019.