Politics & Power Quote by Donald Kagan

Kagan’s sentence is a gate slammed in the face of a familiar pundit reflex: call America “Rome” when you want instant drama, moral warning, and a ready-made plotline of decadence and collapse. As a classicist and military historian, he’s defending taxonomy as much as history. “Empire” isn’t a spooky vibe or a destiny; it’s a specific arrangement of sovereignty, tribute, coercion, and administrative control. His target isn’t only the loose metaphor, but the political work that metaphor performs: if the U.S. is an empire, then every overseas base becomes a legionary outpost, every intervention a conquest, every alliance a subject province. The analogy smuggles in a verdict before the evidence arrives.

The subtext is disciplinary and ideological at once. Disciplinary, because Kagan is warning that anachronism turns history into costume drama: Rome’s empire grew through annexation, citizenship politics, and direct rule; its economy and military manpower were organized around a very different state capacity and social order. Ideological, because “America-as-empire” can serve opposite agendas: anti-interventionists use it to argue for retrenchment; critics of U.S. power use it to brand domination; hawks sometimes embrace it as a grim necessity. Kagan’s move tries to deny all of them their favorite prop by insisting the concept itself has been flattened into insult or prophecy.

Context matters: this is the post-Cold War, post-Iraq-era argument about American primacy, when “imperial” became shorthand for overreach. Kagan’s insistence on “reasonable meaning” is less pedantry than an attempt to keep political debate from laundering itself through a misleading ancient mirror.