The Israeli Option in Strategy

[Norfolk]

Penta - My recommendation: stop watching Fox News, and actually visit some foreign countries. Really, it's not that bad out there.

Norfolk - Both economic and population statistics even for the late Empire (especially the former) are far too unreliable to really make those kind of sweeping judgments as to what caused the decline of the Western Empire. I notice that there is no discussion of the role of political breakdown amongst the Roman political elite in your thesis, or the general inability of a preindustrial bureaucracy to efficiently manage such a farflung and infrastructurally challenged empire. Also, really, where's the evidence for imminent or even approaching civilizational collapse, unless you're one of those modern T. Lothrop Stoddard types?

Some good points Tequila, but I was not intending to present a comprehensive thesis for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (at least its Western portion). I was limiting myself to alternative strategic approaches and the causes that many historians have identified as contributing to the disintegration of Roman military power over the course of the 3rd to 6th centuries AD. You are quite right that economic and population statistics are unreliable, but we have nothing better in their place. We have to work with what we have.

As to the role of political breakdown, political breakdown had occurred during the 3rd century, resulting in the Empire's collapse in 284 AD and subsequent reconstruction by Diocletian. But the failure of his constitutional mechanism, the Tetrarchy, and the rise of Constantine, civil wars that occurred in the late 4th century, Theodosius' reign as the last sole Emperor, and the splitting of the Roman polity into factions allied with particular barbarians (such as the party that opened one of the gates to Rome to Alaric's Visigoth Army in 410), were not necessarily all that much worse than the factionalization of the Roman elite both before, and in the decades shortly after, Augustus. Those factions opened the gates, figuratively speaking, to competing Roman generals and their armies.

The events of the 3rd century stand out because of the nearly century-long state of an-and off civil war and the rise of the Gallic Empire for a time as a rival in the West, in addition to the deflation of the buying power of the currency (denarrii), and what appears to be a noticeable decline in the birth rate. What occurred during the civil wars leading up to the accession of Augustus, and the civil wars that occurred only a few decades afterwards in the time leading up to the accession of the Flavians and the "Five Good Emperors", was not greatly less dangerous than what occurred in the late 4th and early 5th centuries until 410.

A major difference between the 1st Centuries BC and AD on the one hand, and the 4th and 5th on the other, as any number of historians tell us (I prefer Palmer and Toynbee, amongst others), tell us, was the apparent drop in birth rate, and the weakening of the economy (leading to Diocletian's system of compelling the son to follow in his father's occupation, and binding most people to the locality in which they lived and no longer permitting most people to move about within the Empire). The late years of the Republic and the early years of the Empire did not appear to face these limitations, and indeed resorted to the use of client-states and kingdoms, such as Commogene, Palestine, and Armenia in the East, and certain "kingdoms" and tribes in what later became the province of Germania. Once these had been disposed of, Rome had to bear the burden alone for both defending them from external threats, and from internal rebellion and disorder.

I was not intending to suggest anything like "imminent civilizational collapse"; that is taking my points much too far. My object was to point out that our strategic options, like those of the Romans, become increasingly limited in time by such factors as economic weakness or unsound fundamentals and low birth-rates. The Israeli Option is vulnerable to those factors.