Imperialism: Lessons From History

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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