A.D<\/span>., and thirty-eight of them died violently. After Constantine died in 337, Rome was ever more frequently and heavily dependent upon mercenaries, frontier barbarians of questionable loyalty, and the interventions of religious leaders. Later Roman government was thoroughly debased, conducted mainly by warlords who had no real fealty to Rome at all. And even after seven hundred years of preeminent influence in western Europe, when the Empire was more or less competently directed from Rome, and after a century of increasing chaos, when it was overwhelmed by barbarian masses, the eastern Roman Empire soldiered on for nearly another thousand years. The extremities of institutional decrepitude, venality, and fragmentation had to be reached before Rome could be described as being in irreversible decline.<\/p>\nThe United States is today no less important a country in the world than it was a year ago or ten or twenty or thirty years ago.<\/p>\n
I speak as one who is so steeped in Oswald Spengler\u2019s claim of the coming \u201cdecline of the West\u201d <\/span>that after the last U.S.<\/span> presidential election I actually had a dream in which there appeared a modified version of the song from Kiss Me, Kate<\/span> (1953) in which we are admonished to \u201cbrush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Brush up your Shakespeare and they\u2019ll all kowtow.\u201d In my subconscious version, Spengler replaced Shakespeare, and if we brushed him up we would all better kowtow to the Chinese. The thought that the inexorable decline has already begun certainly seemed plausible, but on considering it carefully and despite the inauspicious beginning of the present administration, I do not think that any such conclusion is justified.<\/p>\n