When Great Powers Forget What Made Them Great
- Edwin O. Paña
- 56 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Rome, America, and the Failure of Judgment
By Edwin O. Paña
There are meaningful parallels, but I’d phrase it carefully: the United States under Trump shows some patterns that historians associate with the Roman Republic’s decline and the later stresses of the Roman Empire—but America is not simply “repeating Rome.”
The more interesting comparison is actually with the late Roman Republic, before Augustus, rather than with the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
Rome’s republican institutions gradually became less important than the personalities commanding them. Political opponents increasingly treated one another not merely as rivals but as existential enemies. Norms that had restrained political power weakened. Wealth and influence became increasingly concentrated. Populist leaders appealed directly to aggrieved citizens over established elites. Loyalty to individual leaders sometimes became stronger than loyalty to institutions.
That is where the Trump-era comparison becomes provocative.
The strongest parallels
1. Institutions versus the leader.
Late Republican Rome increasingly revolved around powerful individuals—Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar—who tested conventions that had previously constrained political competition. In contemporary America, arguments over presidential authority, executive power, courts, Congress, and the independence of government institutions similarly raise the question: Are institutions stronger than the person temporarily occupying them?
2. Extreme political polarization.
Rome eventually reached the point where political defeat could mean exile, confiscation, prosecution, or death. America is nowhere near Roman civil-war conditions, but the language of American politics increasingly portrays the opposing side as a fundamental threat to the country. That erosion of mutual legitimacy is historically significant.
3. Populism and resentment of elites.
Roman political entrepreneurs successfully mobilized citizens who believed the existing order benefited aristocratic elites. Trump’s political success likewise rests substantially on voters who believe political, cultural, bureaucratic, and economic establishments stopped representing them. The circumstances are very different, but the political mechanism has similarities.
4. Growing inequality and economic dislocation.
Rome experienced enormous concentrations of wealth alongside economic pressure on ordinary citizens. Modern America has its own very different version: extraordinary wealth creation accompanied by inequality, housing pressures, regional decline, and anxiety about globalization and technological displacement.
5. Politics becomes spectacle.
Roman politics became increasingly theatrical and personalized. Modern technology takes this much further. Television, social media, rallies, viral confrontation, and constant political messaging can make politics about personalities and loyalty rather than policy and institutional procedure.
The danger of imperial overconfidence
But there is another parallel that I think is particularly relevant to Trump’s America:
Great powers can begin believing that their dominance itself guarantees obedience.
Rome possessed enormous military and economic power, but maintaining its system became increasingly expensive. Borders, armies, political instability, taxation, currency problems and distant conflicts accumulated.
The United States faces a modern—not identical—version of the imperial dilemma: global military commitments, competition with China, enormous federal debt, pressure on alliances, industrial competition, and the cost of maintaining a global order that America helped construct.
And here lies a paradox.
If Washington treats alliances, trade relationships and international institutions primarily as transactions in which American power should extract immediate concessions, it may gain something today while weakening the network that magnifies American power tomorrow.
An empire—or hegemonic power—can sometimes damage itself not because its enemies suddenly become stronger, but because its friends gradually decide they need alternatives.
But there is one enormous difference
The United States possesses institutional defenses Rome never had in comparable form: a written Constitution, regularly scheduled national elections, federalism, independent courts, a professional civil service and military, a huge private economy, universities, civil society, and centuries of constitutional precedent.
And Donald Trump is neither Caesar nor an emperor. Historical analogies become misleading when we force individuals into ancient roles.
So I wouldn’t write “Trump is
causing the fall of the
American Empire.” I would
make the argument more
sophisticated:
America may be displaying some of the behaviours that historically appear when a dominant power begins consuming the institutional foundations of its own strength.
That distinction matters.
The Roman lesson isn’t simply that empires collapse. Almost everything eventually changes.
The deeper lesson is that great powers often begin declining internally before the decline becomes obvious externally. Political norms deteriorate. Institutions lose legitimacy. Citizens retreat into hostile camps. Short-term victories become more important than maintaining the system. Eventually outsiders discover that the supposedly invulnerable power isn’t as cohesive as it once appeared.
And there’s a fascinating connection here with the themes we’ve been developing around judgment and wisdom:
Rome did not lack intelligence.
Rome did not lack military power.
Rome did not lack wealth.
What it increasingly lacked was the collective judgment necessary to preserve the system that had created those advantages.
Central Thesis
Great powers do not decline simply because their rivals become stronger. They decline when they lose the judgment to recognize and preserve the institutions, alliances, norms, and sources of legitimacy that made them powerful in the first place.
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