The American empire is arrogant, brutal and yet completely indispensable to Western civilisation.

In the legendary HBO series The Sopranos, a Hasidic Jew, being beaten for not paying up, refers to Masada, where a handful of Jewish zealots kept an entire Roman legion at bay for years. ‘Where are the Romans now?’, he asked. Tony Soprano’s response: ‘You’re looking at them, asshole.’

Like the Mafia, Americans are hardly reluctant to apply force against opponents. As we see in Iran, even a bully can prove a civilisational necessity when confronted with existential threats. At a time when most democracies have become cream puffs, there remains a need for an authoritative force, which right now only America and Israel seem willing and able to apply.

How the current conflict in Iran ends up is far from certain, but something had to be done about the Islamic Republic. The world’s primary exporter of terrorism was on the verge of being able to deliver nuclear-tipped missiles over long distances. Nothing was going to stop them – not the EU, much less the United Nations. Britain, which can barely defend its bases in Cyprus, has not proved of much consequence.

The US’s use of force has led one establishment commentator to label America a ‘predatory hegemon’, much as Rome was in its heyday.

It is certainly not fashionable to sing the praises of empire, but perhaps, given the nature of things, an imperial power can sometimes be the best guarantor of economic security, order and growth. In the period of the republic, and then the empire, the Romans built the walls, roads and aqueducts that enabled a remarkable expansion of trade in goods and ideas, including Christianity. The Romans also swept the Mediterranean of pirates and fended off nomadic forces, serving as guarantors of ancient civilisation. Later, when the imperial barriers came down, the transportation networks that had brought prosperity collapsed, while repeated incursions by new peoples drove the West into a prolonged dark age.

Europe’s leaders, even right-wing politicians such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, clearly lack the will to defend their own countries. Much of the intelligentsia prefers to attack America even as Iran sends agents to kill their fellow citizens and hurls missiles at their possessions. Europe is devolving into what the Greeks were to the Romans: a source of cultural inspiration, but of little consequence in terms of power. Rome, after all, had easily steamrollered the Greeks by 146 BC.

For two centuries, Britain – America’s colonial forebear – played much the same role as the Romans, assuring freedom of the seas and curtailing ambitious rivals such as France and later Germany. But Britain is a shadow of its former self, with a navy unable to fulfil the most basic defensive role. The former imperial power has been defanged by multiculturalism, coupled with a radical green agenda.

Europe’s fragility has been particularly evident since the fall of the USSR. It has eschewed military strength in favour of what one observer describes as ‘the delusion of soft power and woke diplomacy’. European leaders seem to regard the winning of the Cold War as a triumph of their beloved rules-based order, but it was ultimately America’s raw power – financial, technological, cultural – that won it.

One wonders what the likes of Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron could do to stop the messianic mullahs and their Islamist terrorist agenda. They increasingly do not matter much in any case. Today, China is America’s only real rival – just as in the third century, when the Middle Kingdom and Rome dominated much of the world’s population. India may achieve superpower status in the longer term, but no one is likely to overshadow the US in the coming decade.

China is in many ways as different from the US as it was in Roman times. Then, as now, China is largely an inward-looking country dominated by a single ethnicity. It can be efficient and even brilliant, but lacks the transnational appeal of Rome, much less the global reach and dynamism of an increasingly diverse America. Across the world, we see the growing dominance of English, American music and the ubiquitous New York Yankees cap on young people in cities from Rome to Seoul.

As with the Romans, military power lies at the core of this empire, as demonstrated by the ability to devastate national foes such as Iraq and now Iran. Almost alone in the Western world, America still possesses a home-grown warrior class, drawn mainly from the South and heartland regions – the modern-day equivalent of Rome’s small landowners, or the working and upper-class men who staffed Britain’s powerful navy.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo credit: Official White House photo by Patrick B. Ruddy, via Flickr in Public Domain as a Government work.