Manging the Barbarians

[Norfolk]

Now I'm trying to remember who wrote this, but sometime in the past few months I read where the effectiveness of Roman strategy progressively declined as Rome moved away from partially surrounding itself with client-states. The client states of course financed their own military forces and campaigns against external threats while Rome was able to reserve much of its own force for major threats or decisive operations, and not have to foot the anything like the full bill themselves. Augustus and his immediate successors had something very good going.

Admittedly, the Romans did not face anything like an equivalent threat in the east until the Persians overthrew the Parthians in the 3rd Century A.D., and it is doubtful that even reasonably capable client-states of Augustus' time such as Commagene would have lasted long against a Persian attack.

The author whose name I cannot recall did point out something critical about the Rhine and Danube frontiers. When the Romans disposed of their barbarian client-"states" in those areas during Augustus' time, the burden for the defense of those frontiers fell mainly upon the Roman Army (the remaining client-tribes were of little value beyond local reconnaissance and early-warning so to speak). After the failed attempted Roman pacification and annexation of Germany and the Pannonian Revolt in the Balkans, the Romans not only had to rely upon their own raw military force to keep both the local populations in order and the barbarians in check, they lost their ability to move the better of the Army to decisive theatres of operations, all in considerable part due to the fact that they had eliminated most of their client-state allies.

I would argue that prudent great powers had established systems of client-states prior to needing them in a crisis, whereas imprudent great powers had established or re-established client-states when their own military weakness had become critical. The Romans were good examples of both prudence and imprudence in the use of client-states. Prudently maintaining client-states while one was still militarily strong rather than imprudently annexing them and thus having not only to bear the entire military burden oneself, but also losing the freedom to move the bulk of one's military forces to decisive theatres of operations, is the way to go.

Once one finds oneself in the position of needing to create client-states (or tribes), or re-create said after one has already eliminated them, due to military weakness and over-extension, then such client-states are at best a measure of desperation. Given that the clients are aware of one's military weakness, they are then in the position of being able to either demand more resources from the weakened great power, or of throwing or threatening to throw their support to a rival power, etc. Attempting to assimilate, as Steve observed, is strategically futile in most cases.

In short, as far as client-states go, they're good before the fact, when you don't immediately need them, and a drain when to have to create them after the fact. The key of course, is not to militarily over-extend oneself in the first place. This may well be the condition the U.S. has entered into recently. As such, its options may be a good deal more constrained, especially when it comes to client-states/tribes and the like.

As for immigration, well of course it's reverse-colonization. Go to the great cities of Western Europe and North America and you'll see immigrant communities that have reached a critical level in that assimiliation of many of them into the general population is no longer possible. I live only an hour-and-a-half from a city of some millions where over half the population was born outside of North America. There are tens of thousands of kids born in Toronto, never been to their parents's homeland, but have never spoken any langauge other than that of the parents and rarely associate with anyone outside of their particular ethnic group. They don't even speak English as a second language. It's a growing problem, and the authorities are at a loss to know what to do about it.