“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
– Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization
Enemy Within
How does a superpower die?
Does it come from the blinding kill shot of a hypersonic missile streaking through the sky? Or, perhaps, a rogue cyberattack that mortally destroys the national power grid?
Will the end of America come with foreign tanks rolling through New York or a massive, coordinated amphibious attack on Los Angeles?
These dramatic scenarios make for captivating conjecture. But they’re highly unlikely. If you look at the autopsy reports of the world’s greatest empires, the ultimate cause of death is rarely a sudden, overwhelming external blow.
Long before the barbarians breached the gates of Rome, the Roman denarius had been systematically devalued into a glorified copper token to fund a bloated bureaucracy. This was characterized by widespread domestic corruption and endless military expansion. Continue reading
