America is a Late-Stage Republic – Like Rome “The Roman era’s declension was a time in which bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.”
– Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 
America follows the trajectory of many leading world countries before it June 20, 2025 — What’s odd about the last four years before Trump is that the Biden-Harris administration came in and was welcomed by liberals around the world. “The adults were back in the room.” American foreign policy was going to respect alliances again, and it all went disastrously wrong.
The allies have been sorely disappointed. The net result of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was that an axis formed that didn’t exist in 2020, an axis that brought together Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. And unlike the axis of evil of 2002 around the Iraq War, it actually exists. It’s not just an idea for a speech. These powers cooperate together, economically and militarily.
What went wrong? The answer is a disastrous failure of deterrence that really began in Afghanistan in 2021, got a lot worse in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and got even worse in 2023 when Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacked Israel.
So I think one has to understand the reelection of Donald Trump as partly a public reaction against a very unsuccessful Democratic administration, a little bit like what happened in 1980 when Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and repudiated Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.
I don’t think Donald Trump’s reelection is a big win for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Quite the opposite. I think it’s bad news for them.
I am always reminded when people talk about the liberal international order of what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: It was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire. And the same is true of the liberal international order. It was never very liberal, very international, or very orderly. It’s actually an illusion that such a thing ever existed after 1945.
There was a cold war in which two empires, an American and a Soviet, struggled for power, and the United States at no point ceased to exercise power in the classical sense.
I read so many commentators saying, “How terrible and shocking it is that the United States is reverting to empire after the wonderful time of the liberal international order.” I wrote a book 20 years ago called Colossus, making the point that the United States has been an empire for many years and didn’t stop being an empire in 1945.
The interesting thing about the Cold War was that both empires accused the other of imperialism, each claiming that it wasn’t imperial. But they both, in fact, functionally were empires.
The United States today has much in common with the empires of the past, particularly in its ability to project military and naval power all around the world. So I think we should probably be a little bit more skeptical about the concept of a liberal international order.
What’s interesting about Trump is that he’s open about it. He wants Greenland. He wants to retake the Panama Canal. And so, in a sense, we’ve gone back to the era of President William McKinley at the turn of the 20th century.
But that’s not surprising, because Trump told us in the campaign back in the summer that McKinley was his hero, and that was not just the “tariff man” McKinley, but clearly also the McKinley who acquired, after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines with an option on Cuba. So I think we are just back in a late 19th-century mode with Donald Trump.
One of the points I made in Colossus was that the United States is not actually very good at being an empire by the standards of, say, Britain in the 19th century. There’s a structural problem with an American empire, which is worth spelling out.
There are deficits that make it hard to be an effective empire. There’s a deficit in terms of manpower. I mean, America imports people. It doesn’t really export people. Very few Americans want to spend large amounts of time in hot, poor, dangerous places. Hence, the six-month tour of duty for the military abroad.
There’s another kind of deficit, which is the fiscal deficit. America can’t afford to occupy zones across the planet the way the British or the French did.
Presently, there is also the problem that America is now spending more on debt interest payments than on the defense budget for the first time in its history. When that is the case, you’re probably in trouble. That’s been true, more or less, of every empire since 16th-century Spain.
And finally, there’s an attention deficit disorder, which I think is inherent in American public and political life. People lose interest in complicated, messy foreign adventures rather quickly, and that makes it very hard to complete them, whether it’s in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
All these are structural problems. The American empire is one of these strange cases of cognitive dissonance: Functionally, the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but Americans themselves don’t really want to be in the empire business, and this causes American power to oscillate. There are periods of strength, then there are periods of retreat. And after Trump overreaches, which he doubtless will, there’ll be another bout of retreat. We’ve seen this movie several times. Continued Below... The Great Awokening I think what was striking about the Great Awokening, the last diffusion of extreme progressive ideology, was how intolerant it was. It made life extremely unpleasant on university campuses because the intolerance of radical progressives for any ideas to the right of themselves was a distinguishing feature of their brief reign of moral terror.
In truth, for most of the last 60 years, most people retained considerable allegiance to faith and to nation and to family. You might have been flying over them between Los Angeles and New York, but that was, broadly speaking, the case.
What happened in the 1960s was that the elites, beginning in the English-speaking world, embraced a quite radical social change in which sexuality was far less strictly controlled, in which a whole range of different beliefs were given legitimacy and the gods of the Victorians of the 19th century were ridiculed and mocked.
What happened in the last 10 years was that the radical left, having been entirely defeated in the field of economics, decided to adopt a radical identity politics, aiming to transform our understanding of American history and of today’s American society in a way that was deliberately divisive and hostile to individual identity. It reemphasized racial difference, abandoning the notion that a society could be color-blind. It weaponized categories like “transgender,” a tiny minority of people.
All of these things were calculated to create a new and revolutionary cultural environment. This was achieved to a large extent in many universities, but it didn’t really extend very far. And in fact, when one looks at the polling around the last election, you realize that the left of the Democratic Party on a whole range of issues, like, for example, the rights of transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, diverged so far from mainstream opinion that they were almost off the charts. Mainstream opinion, regardless of whether it was the opinion of a white person or a brown person, hadn’t moved nearly as far on those identity issues as the left wanted to go.
So what has happened isn’t really a profound backlash, just a repudiation of those ideas by ordinary Americans.
When Richard Nixon used the phrase “silent majority,” it was in response to anti-war protests in 1968-69. He understood that if you just did the numbers, the people protesting were a tiny minority of Americans. Most Americans were not actually with them, and so the appeal to a silent majority was a shrewd move by Nixon to exploit the fact that most people are, in fact, quite socially conservative and are not particularly interested in revolutions in their norms.
But the left forgot that again, and it walked into the same trap that the left walked into in ’68, which was to go too far in radicalizing relations between the sexes and relations between the races. If you go too far in that direction, the silent majority says, “Hang on, we’re going to stop being silent as long as it takes to shut you up.”
Niall Ferguson
Excerpted from The Free Press P.S. from Addison: Although America is showing signs of a late-stage Republic, the AI revolution is giving the country one last chance to get its fiscal house in order.
Spoiler alert – it won’t. The Big Beautiful Bill is going through some changes in the Senate.
But just because a debt crisis is inevitable doesn’t mean you have to suffer when it does happen. With the rapid growth possibilities of AI, investors in the right place can at least outgrow the spending problem that the government can’t.
The best places to do that aren’t in the Nvidias or Teslas of the world these days. They’re in smaller companies that do more behind-the-scenes support work.
Each week, we explore these off-the-radar investment ideas in Grey Swan Live!, often brought by our contributors and special guests.
For instance, in yesterday’s Grey Swan Live! with Chris Mayer, we explored some of Chris’s top investment ideas, including some of the best value plays in countries such as Sweden and Poland.
For U.S. investors, tread lightly – these companies can only be bought on the pink sheets, where volume is light and prices can swing wildly. But if you’re looking for value now, going overseas may be just the place to do it – and it’s not too late to become a member and start profiting.
Meanwhile, our Portfolio Director, Andrew Packer, will be attending the Rule Investment Symposium in Boca Raton, FL, July 7-11, 2025. Click here to view the stellar speaker lineup and learn how you can attend.
Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
How did we get here? Find out in these riveting reads: Demise of the Dollar, Financial Reckoning Day, and Empire of Debt — all three books are now available in their third post-pandemic editions. You might enjoy one or all three.
 (Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites: Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million or Target.)
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com |
Post a Comment
Post a Comment