Consider though who were the respective external powers that came at each and at which time. The Sasanians were exhausted after holding the line with the Romans for centuries when the Muslim wave of expansion hit. The other two ran into the two top conquerors in history at a time their own leadership was less than stellar.
I never got a notification of this post. Discourse has oddities.
Anyway, I see nothing approaching an answer to my sincere question, so I’m guessing that “good faith” is meant to be as enigmatic as your earlier post.
60 years ago, the oil wells off the coast of California meant that the top % of its high school kids got free ride scholarships through its universities. 30 years later that was long gone, and college money could be obtained by fighting for the oil wells in the Persian Gulf.
As noted above, the war bill did get cheaper in both dollars and blood, but not kept in scale with the prices that were jacked up elsewhere. Prices you already know, but so as not to be enigmatic: education, healthcare, housing, heating and energy, and vehicles. And now: gas and food, that were kept in reach no matter how much else ground was lost elsewhere, are getting squeezed. We’re a nation in decline, a nation with no business shouldering so big a military budget.
But the people on top of the US, Left and Right, don’t care. Most due to the Right, IMHO (it was Reagan who stopped free CA college, for instance), but rich blue cites like Seattle are covered in blue tarp homeless camps. So it’s not all one side’s fault.
What does that say? Family farms were swallowed by corporate farms, family homes are now rented out by corporations instead of mortgaged. Nobody had any cash: it’s all sucked up by… corporations.
And that doesn’t seem to bother anyone who has any power. As far as I can tell, the expectation is that everyone who makes less than $75K will die out, and the US will be like the Netherlands: a small, rich country with only a few really smart people; only with bigger national parks. But even the Dutch put down the imperial big stick after losing the Battle of Camperdown. We won’t do that. The US will be in another war in a few months, flying C-130’s loaded with 6-foot pallets of $20 and $100 bills just like 2003.
I think this is the typical scenario, There is a slow gradual decline that generally goes fairly unnoticed, and it seems like business as usual unless you are paying close attention (in that respect the Ottoman empire probably bad example as everyone was predicting its imminent demise, and in fact they did better than expected in WW1 despite the centuries of decline) then some crisis comes along which a great power should be able to take in their stride, and instead causes the whole thing to come crashing down.
But the crisis was not the reason the great power collapsed, it was just the thing that exposed who close to collapse it had been for ages.
Thanks for an answer.
I’m not going to disagree with your rant; I’ve been yelling for a lowering of the Defense budget since the Vietnam era.
Technically, though, the facts tell a different story. The DoD budget stayed remarkably level in current dollars for the entire decade of the 1990s, which meant it fell by 50% in terms of GDP in that decade. Nor has it ever come officially close to the GDP percentage of the 1980s since, although I’m pretty sure that it would if the off-budget spending of Bush II were included. This doesn’t mean there was ever a “peace dividend.” I hope no one rational ever believed in such nonsense.
The rest of your rant is not exactly history as I see it. Corporations had been dominant since the 19th century. Much of the change you talk about has in fact come about because of the abrupt fall from dominance of corporations, i.e. places that made things. Most of the wealth in the country is a result of pushing money around in various forms, as the disaster of 2008 proved. Individuals like Musk, Gates, Bezos, and Zuckerberg are gaudy red herrings. Three firms - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street - control the equivalent of 60% of the value of all S&P 500 firms. Corporations are today tools of massive funds that control how they function. These do push money to stockholders, of course, but individual small stockholders have proportionally far less say than they did in the industrial age.
The three firms have $22,000 billion in funds. The DoD budget is currently $731 billion. That tail wags no dog.
The economist Giovanni Arrighi (among others) has noted the change in so e empires from industrial capitalism–actually making stuff–to financial capitalism, which is more or less parasitical. The Genoese, Dutch, British, and US empires, he (and others) have followed this model. As empires, they lose their global influence and their own populations may suffer but those at the top continue to make out just fine. Capitalism is a system for private, individual profit for a few, and those few don’t care if the profit comes from making stuff and creating jobs or from credit and loans and finance that produces nothing, as long as the profit rate is good. I think this needs to be added into discussions of empire; we spend a lot of time on military capacity and related topics. It’s not irrelevant, but it is a reflection of what is happening int the economy.
This post is largely wrong.
Our military spending is entirely manageable in context of our GDP. We have just entered a period of inflation, but for like 35 years before that inflation had been below a typical historical average. The price of fuel for example, which has surged with the most recent inflation, prior to that it was literally about the same price it has been for 30 years inflation-adjusted.
The decision to stop funding college at State colleges primarily through the budgeting process was a political decision–not out of lack of capacity, in fact with taxes lower now than they were in the past we could easily resume such a program if we really wanted, but political choices do get made.
None of these paint a particularly strong picture about decline. American GDP growth has remained strong the past 30 years, and unlike most of our Western peers we have maintained some level of population growth. That last one is most likely to be our actual more serious problem that could lead to decline, with a very hostile to immigration political party and lower birth rates we will likely have to manage a declining population in the next 40-50 years, and that can be done but requires deliberate decisions.
So we can afford another 20-year meat grinder? Hey, that’s great news!
As a matter of fact, sure, we spent more in a year of high octane economy juicing in response to covid than we did in Iraq + Afghanistan combined. There is absolutely no good reason to get into stupid boondoggle wars and waste tons of blood and treasure, but could we afford to–sure. Could != should.
Yeah but I think the larger context is that Persia can be attacked from several different sides which increases the odds over a long period of time of facing some formidable conqueror. It is notable that each of these conquests came from a different direction.