Far from me to want to jump into an ongoing OT conversation which I do not really follow, but on the topic of Madden's book (Richard: thanks for the link), I've had a look and as somebody with more than a passing knowledge of Roman history (out of private interest) and strategy (out of my actual field of research as a univ.prof) I am not particularly impressed. There has always been a certain fascination among U.S.-based historian/strategists for drawing parallels between the U.S. and the Romans, which are interesting up to a point but which you simply cannot take too far---the time scale alone shows that they are very different critters. A classical controversy which Madden seems to implicitly draw from (although I have only read groups of pages here and there) was the one around Edward Luttwalk's "The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire", focused on the 1st to 3rd centuries after "the crucified jew", i.e. the principate (and I find it quite odd that Madden does not quote it at all). Since its publication in the 1970s, Luttwalk's book was used again and again to speak about the U.S.' grand strategy in strategy circles (think tanks and even the military), but it soon turned out that ascribing a grand strategy which lasted over generations to the Romans involved too much wishful thinking (although of course institutions survived individual emperors). (Aside: if you are interested, I recommend the 6-page popular-science article of Duncan Campbell in Ancient Warfare, available for free at academia.edu: http://www.academia.edu/856651/Did_Rome_have_a_Grand_Strategy )

My impression is that Madden is just falling into the same trap, deciding in advance to draw parallels and then squeezing things into a given scheme, simply because it sounds good to be compared to an idealized version of a "Roman Republic". Such comparisons gloss over the fact that said Republic was actually an oligarchy, certainly not a Gov code 4 in Traveller terms, and that their Empire was built along centuries.

This fascination with Rome leads to interesting comparisons at times (if a bit amusing if you are not U.S.-centric), but to gratuituous comments in other cases. Let me quote an article from "Parameters", which is the journal of the U.S. Army War College:

“Nations project their military power according to their economic resources and in defense of their broad economic interests,” Paul Kennedy has argued. “But, the cost of projecting that military power is more than even the largest economies can afford indefinitely, especially when new technologies and new centers of production shift economic power away from established Great Powers—hence the rise and fall of nations.” The mechanism that seems to lead a nation-state from liberal towards more imperial forms of intervention is military force itself, and particularly the manner in which it is used. For the Roman Empire, it was the legions—the institution of last resort—that, in their efforts to secure Rome and her empire by means of increasingly authoritarian uses
of coercive force, contributed to her decline. Great care must be taken to ensure that the actions our own “legions” take in defense of liberalism do not have the unintended effect of fostering illiberalism.

I'll let you decide whether the comment is gratuitous or not, but you see how this Roman-U.S. analogy wish permeates strategy discussions. The article is "The True Tragedy of American Power" by Isaiah Wilson in Parameters 43(4), Winter 13-14, which is worth reading (IMHO) if you are itnerested in the question of the "U.S. Empire". The journal itself is available for free at the U.S. Army College's website, http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 11:23 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:

On 6/2/2016 10:31 PM, Richard Aiken wrote:

BTW, the lost Russian empire I was referring to (of course) was not the collapse of Imperial Russia but rather the collapse of the USSR and consequently the Warsaw Pact.

We call that one the Evil Empire. ;-)

Definitely an empire of conquest (both actual - re Prague Spring - and threatened), in the terms of Professor Thomas F. Madden [http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Trust-Built-America-Building/dp/0452295459].

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as Muhammed." Alexis de Tocqueville (1843)

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"It has been my experience that a gun doesn't care who pulls its trigger." Newton Knight (as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), to a scoffing Confederate tax collector facing the weapons held by Knight's young children and wife.