by Victor Davis Hanson;

THE WORD “imperialism” comes from the Latin word imperium. It refers to a nation or a state implanting its rule on other states, treating them as subordinates and in an inferior fashion. Some suggest today that America is behaving imperialistically—we do, after all, have some 600 military bases around the world. So it is worth recalling some historical examples of imperialism to understand what the idea entails. Looking at empires through history, we can identify several things that most of them have in common.

One is that their leaders often say or seem to believe that their imperialist policies have little to do with self-interest.

Another trait empires have in common is obviously their dependence for enforce- ment on some type of superior military power

A third characteristic empires share in common—perhaps the most inter- esting and thoughtworthy—is that for all the supposed advantages to be had through imperial rule, a historical case can be made that it has never quite penciled out. The costs of control seem to outweigh the benefits, even though— human nature being what it is—the imperialists tend to be oblivious to the expenses, perhaps because of the power and grandeur that come with empire.

One corollary to the unprofitability of empire is that it tends to corrupt the character of the imperial power.

if we read Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, published in 1852, we see that at the heart of the empire in London, there were vast numbers of people who were in poor- houses at the same time the country was spending its resources far and wide on its great imperial civilizing mission. This in turn might make us think of present day San Francisco, where people are injecting themselves with drugs, for- nicating, urinating, and defecating on the streets, and downtown businesses are closing in large numbers; or Chicago, where the murder and crime rates are making life there unbearable for so many. Our major cities are going to rot at the same time we are pledged to giving $120 billion to Ukraine, already making its military budget the third largest in the world. And the decay goes beyond the large cities. Think of those gruesome scenes in East Palestine, Ohio, after the train crash that enveloped the town in a toxic chemi- cal cloud.

Looking outward, we can see two clear manifestations of imperialism today. One is the Chinese brand of impe- rialism. China de facto now controls 15 of the major ports in the world...

The Chinese are very farsighted, so these ports are not just random acquisitions. They con- trol the Panama Canal. They monitor the entry into the Mediterranean at Tangiers and the exit at Port Said. The two largest ports in Europe, Antwerp and Rotterdam, are in the hands of the Chinese, as are the artificial islands in the South China Sea, a gateway for 50 percent of global oceanic traffic. In other words, the Chinese control 15 points at which, in a global crisis, they will be able to shut off trade and access to commercial goods, oil, and food, not to mention the influence they have gained over local governments...China today is creating something very much like the British Empire, although the Chinese are more like the imperialists of the Ottoman Empire than those of the British, in that they are nei- ther apologetic nor shy about what they are doing.

The other imperial power we see on the rise today is more insidious. George Orwell’s nightmare dystopia in 1984 was a world in which there were no nation- states, but rather three powers wielding absolute control over three land masses into which everyone had been aggre- gated. Something like this is the dream of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and his fellow globalists (many of them American) who meet annually in Davos. Their vision is of a transnational ruling class, consisting of elites drawn mostly from the business, political, media, and academic worlds, with the power to issue edicts on climate change, public health, diversity, human rights, and even taxes, that override the will of national majorities. If Chinese imperialism follows the tra- dition of the Ottoman Empire, the global- ist vision of Davos imperialism is in the tradition of utopian empires gone astray. I think of Alexander the Great, ...

Let me close by saying that in 1897, Rudyard Kipling was asked to present a poem at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, marking her 60th year as queen. The British Empire, admittedly the most civi- lizing and humane of any empire in his- tory, was in full bloom—it had 420 million people under its sway and covered 12 mil- lion square miles of territory, seven times the area of the Roman Empire. Kipling originally planned to present “The White Man’s Burden” at the event, but he decided instead to present “Recessional,” a bleak poem that includes this stanza: “Far-called, our navies melt away / On dune and head- land sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet / Lest we forget—lest we forget!” “Recessional” is a poem of lamentation in which Kipling, known to be a great sup- porter of the British Empire, seems to be warning that it is destined to fail. Maybe he had been studying history.

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