Over the past three years I have spent an unreasonable amount of time playing Rome: Total War. (I am now giving up, though I make no guarantees about my actions when Empires: Total War comes out.) Readers may be happy to learn that I have successfully thwarted the barbarians. This involved a great deal of fighting on the Danube.
Historically, it was on the Danube that the fall of the Western Empire began. The decisive moment was in 376 AD, when the Eastern Emperor, Valens, made three mistakes, which together proved disastrous. First, he permitted the Goths to cross the Danube and enter the Empire as a cohesive, armed force under their own king. Then, he allowed local officials to mistreat the Goths to the point where they rebelled. Finally, he lost the battle of Adrianople (and his own life).
After that, the collapse of the Western Empire developed with the inevitability of a supertanker running into an iceberg: it was possible to posit alternative scenarios, but at every stage between Adrianople and the deposition of the last Western Emperor (in 476), the road to further disaster was always the most likely one. Stilicho, Aetius and Majorian, among others, did what they could, but they were constantly struggling against the odds, and unable to concentrate on the barbarians, being distracted by the endless deadly intrigues of the imperial court.
Why, I hear the distant legions crying, did the entry of the Goths into the Eastern Empire lead to the fall of the Western Empire? Good question. In short, between the aspirations of the Goths for their own autonomous enclave within the Empire, and the assumptions of the Romans about the proper place of barbarians, there was a chasm. The Roman world-view was that barbarians were acceptable when entering the service of the Empire as individuals, and the late Roman army was full of them (Stilicho himself, for instance). Otherwise, the only good barbarian was a dead one, whether on the battlefield or in the arena. The Goths spent years wandering about the Eastern Empire before giving up on the notion of a deal with the Eastern Empire, and moved West in the hopes of finding a more reasonable negotiating partner. The Western Empire – a more fragile creature than the Eastern – could not survive the forces thus unleashed. For the full story, read Peter Heather’s book, The Fall of the Roman Empire.
The story is worth revisiting. Right-wingers might find in it a lesson about the dangers of allowing organised immigrant groups to enter the state; that is, they take away the message, ‘secure the borders’ or ‘no more policies based on multiculturalist ideology’. Left-wingers might prefer to see an example of the dangers of failing to adapt sufficiently to accommodate immigrant groups, or of failing to earn the trust of the incomers. Certainly the Roman behaviour towards the Germanic incomers was condescending at best and outright atrocious at worst (as in the massacres of the families of Germanic soldiers in Italy after the overthrow of Stilicho). On the whole, there is no necessary contradiction between these insights. It is entirely right that immigrants should be treated rightfully, but it is also right to treat people as individuals first, and only secondarily as members of a group.
The most interesting thing about (say) Amir Khan is not that he is a Muslim; the most interesting thing is that he is Amir Khan.
Another fact about the Roman attitude towards barbarians is their desire, openly expressed at the time, to play one set off against another. The strongest example of this relates to the time, in the fifth century, when the Western Empire paid the Goths (by that time settled in southern Gaul) to attack the Vandals (who had occupied Spain). The Romans were perhaps a little too open in their joy over the fact that both Goths and Vandals took heavy casualties. With this attitude, they could hardly hope to retain the trust of the Goths, and they failed, in the end, to defeat the Vandals decisively enough. The Vandals got their revenge in 455.
History is not short of similar examples. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Soviets congratulated themselves on setting the capitalists against each other. Adam Tooze (in his excellent recent book The Wages of Destruction) recounts the story of the Soviet diplomat who said that normally one would place the Luftwaffe’s losses in one column and set them off against the RAF’s losses in another: the Soviets by contrast would place both sets of losses in the same column and add them up. Doubtless it sounded very clever at the time. It must have seemed a lot less clever after June 22nd 1941. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the notion of helping Saddam’s Iraq to attack Khomeini’s Iran. (That’s another whole post, actually.)
The Aliens versus Predator scenario is always superficially appealing, and almost always* bad in practice. Tolkien actually understood this well. In The Two Towers someone, I think it was Gimli, remarks that in fact Saruman and Sauron are deadly rivals, since both want the Ring in order to gain absolute power over Middle Earth. He suggests that it is a pity that the two are not neighbours, since in that case they could just fight between themselves. Gandalf will have none of it. ‘The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt,’ he says. The real lesson here is to strive always to be strong enough not to have to depend on one’s enemies destroying each other. Which leads me to conclude that if we (that is, the UK) ever lost (or worse, wantonly broke) the Atlantic Alliance, we should either get busy building aircraft carriers, or prepare for some very nasty surprises.
* I say almost always because in some circumstances the scenario isn’t entirely mistaken. The above is not intended as a veiled criticism of the co-option of some former Iraqi insurgents into the Awakening or Sahwa movement. I think that might turn out ok, so long as the Sahwa are genuinely brought under the control of the legitimate government, probably by incorporation into the regular security forces. Plenty of people think that’s impossible, but I think a reconciliation is doable so long as the Americans keep playing the role of honest broker: it’s evident that the Iraqi Sunni and Shia politicians (to oversimplify wildly) trust the US more than they trust each other. But in order for the US to retain its credibility as a broker they need to keep in the game, which in turn means that their (and our) withdrawal must be conditions-based, not timetable-based. (One of the encouraging things about David Cameron is that he understands this quite clearly.) That means that John McCain is the best bet in this year’s election. Obama might, of course, shift from his timetable-based position to a conditions-based position: in fact I expect he will, thus generating howls of outrage from the true believers on the left of the Democrat party. But with McCain there is no doubt at all, and why take the chance?
