
Imperial Wars Always Come Home - ahelwer
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/imperial-wars-always-come-home
======
pattusk
I agree with the article's title but much less with its content, which seems
to claim that returning imperial soldiers will always cause some sort of
trouble for the (soon to be former) empire.

I think it's quite telling the author had to go back to the 15th century to
find a historical precedent for his claim. Especially since the Hundred Years
War could be described as many things (succession war, civil war...) but
certainly not an imperial or colonial war. Why not take an example from the
end of the British Empire, the French Empire or the Japanese Empire - all
great colonial powers in the 20th century? Or Spain, Portugal and Netherlands
before that? Because they are very few. I can only think of the loss of
Algeria and the coup attempt by the French military in that context - but in
the end that hardly destabilized the country.

~~~
starfallg
>I think it's quite telling the author had to go back to the 15th century to
find a historical precedent for his claim.

To me, it is just a period with an anecdote the author was familiar with. The
War of the Roses, while an important event in British history, isn't the type
of nation destabilising event you're looking for either. It is yet another
succession crisis that happened in monarchies time-to-time that was
militarised. The argument being that the militarisation is the result of
failed foreign military campaigns.

>Why not take an example from the end of the British Empire, the French Empire
or the Japanese Empire

All fell more or less as a protracted result of the Second World War followed
by the Cold War. I don't think that is comparable. The Vietnam War and the
cultural effect it had on the US probably more apt. That is probably where
this first began, and then continued with Afghanistan and Iraq.

>Spain, Portugal and Netherlands

The history of both Portugal and the Netherlands are quite intertwined with
Spain and its (ie. the Hasburgs') imperial ambitions. Take the War of Spanish
Succession for example, the Spanish ceded what was left of the Spanish
Netherlands (after the Dutch revolt) to Austria, and arguably had much more
impact than the War of the Roses.

It's a widely accepted view that the imperial activities of these powers in
foreign lands (both in Europe and beyond) aggravated the conflicts in Europe
over several centuries, culminating in the World Wars.

~~~
CaptArmchair
How about the Weimar republic after the end of World War I? Even though that's
not a very apt comparison either.

It feels like the author tries to draw historic parallels with current events,
which is always a tenuous exercise at best.

~~~
mxfh
The Blutmärz Era was quite different too, there a social democrat
administation asked for, or at least tolerated, the aid of right wing forces
(Freikorps) to stop significant strikes of Spartakist Communists, about 2000
of them were killed. That schism and distrust on the left also significantly
helped the Nazis a decade later in not having a unified left to their
opposition.

The conflict here was a fundamantal post war struggle about the course of
action in the first ever German Republic. Germany was not an established
Empire like the others either. It was not even 50 years since the German
Unification 1871 under Prussian Dominance.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_March_Battles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_March_Battles)

------
baybal2
The phenomenon is best explained the other way.

An imperial ruler losing a war, let alone an underhanded one, is most clear
signal to Brutuses in waiting that the empire is weakened, demoralised, and it
is "now, or never."

The later is the most important. The moment the emperor start to reconsolidate
power, the first ones whose heads, or wallets he will reap will be them —
nobles of uncertain loyalty, who usually thrive under such circumstances.

Almost as a rule, empires do not fall when their oppression peaks, but, after
it, when they run out of steam to maintain pressure, and they are crushed by
all old adversaries springing up at the same time.

------
curiousllama
It's odd to me, the need to over-complicate things like this. We've had
escalating protests like this for 10+ years, plus recurring bursts over the
last literal century. And the conclusion is... it's the Iraq war causing all
this?

We had active, publicly-supported policies in place to militarize the police
before Iraq and Afghanistan. The last civil rights movement included much more
violent anti-protester crackdowns than Portland (Kent Stake & Selma come to
mind, let alone the implicitly-supported KKK). Hell - who remembers the images
from Ferguson 6 years ago?

Just because sh*t is going down doesn't mean it's the barbarian hordes
marching on Rome. This has been going down for a WHILE. The president hasn't
changed that.

------
zozin
The fatalism around America’s relative decline is so tiring to read about.
Apparently the only thing that can occur is a sudden and disastrous collapse
of Pax Americana, even though as shortly as 15-20 years ago America enjoyed
total and complete hegemony over the rest of the world (militarily,
economically, politically and culturally).

That period was a historical fluke, in my opinion. At no other time in human
history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was, and to
a certain extent continues to be. To assume that its relative decline can only
continue and exacerbate and end in complete and utter disaster in our
lifetimes reads to me as simplistic binary thinking.

~~~
ahelwer
The system can of course continue to grind & lurch for a very long period of
time. However, here we have a global forcing function: climate change, and the
likely mass refugee crisis. America is not set up politically to welcome those
refugees. The plan is to let them die at the border. It's unlikely a sizable
portion of the American population will accept this solution.

~~~
abduhl
The United States welcomes more immigrants than any other country in the world
with fewer restrictions on who can immigrate than any other country in the
world. What more can America do?

~~~
grey-area
That's not true any more.

The US is now actively hostile to immigrants - travel bans (prior to covid19),
border walls, detention camps, separating young children from parents, denying
visas for students with online courses (the government wanted this, the courts
stopped it). That may change, but the current US administration is very
hostile to immigration.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
The US has always been hostile to low skill immigrants. Reading the civil laws
in any "progressive" northeast state is basically a big game of "were they
trying to screw the Irish or the Italians back when they wrote this."

~~~
adventured
The US is among the least hostile developed nations when it comes to low skill
immigrants. Few other nations allow them in, much less in such massive
numbers. Half of all US immigration is low skill chain migration. The US is
one of the few developed nations not operating primarily on a merit-style
immigration system.

See: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland,
Austria, Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc.

Just try immigrating into those countries and becoming a citizen if you can't
support yourself and or are low skill. Good luck, you'll need it.

------
specialist
Maybe I'm imposing my own, um, _biases_ , onto the OC: methinks many of the
replies here are wide of the mark.

It's pretty simple. The costs and consequences of war will be felt at home as
well as abroad.

First, creating a weapon means it's more likely to be used. An underlying
feared consequence of the military industrial complex is that the build up
increases the _potential_ for violence at the expense of diplomacy.

Second, the wages of war are paid by the people. Returning veterans discarded
by the war machine. Families ravaged. PTSD, addiction, domestic violence,
broken homes. Etc.

Third, everyone's keying off the title, is the chaos in the aftermath of war,
every where. The OC gives a historical example. This story is as old as
humanity. I have nothing new to add here, but will note that some tried to
mitigate these effects with stuff the League of Nations & United Nations, the
Marshall Plan, and so forth. Stabilizing institutions which have been under
continuous attack, from before they were even enacted.

Those who ignore history are fated to repeat it, cliche, blah blah blah.

------
paultopia
A related insightful take by Jacob Levy (an important political theorist) on
the capacity of border lawlessness to undermine the rule of law at home:
[https://www.niskanencenter.org/law-and-
border/](https://www.niskanencenter.org/law-and-border/)

~~~
ahelwer
Very clearly written, excellent read. Thanks for linking.

------
reallydontask
This completely off topic but the author has a long and detailed podcast
series on the fall of the roman empire.

[https://wondery.com/shows/the-fall-of-rome-
podcast/](https://wondery.com/shows/the-fall-of-rome-podcast/)

------
m12k
I think there is a simpler explanation for the fall of empires: They are built
on assumptions about the world in which they are founded, and they come with
coping-mechanisms to deal with the kinds of problems that their founders
expect them to face, based on their own experiences and their understanding
about what went wrong in previous empires. In this way they are like a code
base, built to be easy to extend in the ways where extension is expected, but
rigid in the directions where it is not. But the world changes, and eventually
it will change in ways the founders could not have predicted, and which the
empire is incapable of fully adapting to. Not only that, but as the empire
grows, power is concentrated in its midst, so it becomes more and more
lucrative to game the system, to find ways of exploiting the rules and
institutions of the empire to gain access to this accumulation of power. (In
startups this is similar to when the MBAs start running the company and all
the creative people leave). These adversarial attacks further break down the
coping mechanisms that were supposed to help the empire adapt to a changing
world. It leads to consolidation and inflexibility. And as the center of power
increasingly attracts those with no interest in the sustainability and well-
being of the empire, unrest increases as the common man loses faith in the
empire, and its ability to deal with the issues of today. The empire is now in
crisis, and it will either adapt through a massive change (a civil war that is
swiftly resolved, a 'New Deal' or similar) that 'resets' its alignment, and
makes it capable of change in new needed directions (not unlike a pivot in
startup parlance), or it will fall apart (typically through a civil war that
never really ends).

The US has managed to survive several such crises (e.g. the Civil War and the
Depression) but there are many ways in which the coping mechanisms that its
founders created have been hamstrung. The 2nd amendment made perfect sense
when the biggest perceived risk to the wellbeing of your citizens was a
foreign tyrant occupying their land - but today it is far, far more likely
that you will be shot by your neighbor. Guaranteeing free speech makes perfect
sense, but the founders never predicted a world of multimedia broadcast, where
the person or company with the most money can drown out the speech of everyone
else. Letting everyone be free to pursue happiness on their own is a great
principle, but it never predicted a world where people and corporations could
be rich enough to suppress social mobility as much as an aristocracy does. The
three branches of government were supposed to provide checks and balances on
each other, but this breaks down when massive partisan polarization puts the
executive and legislative branch in bed with each other, and they join forces
to appoint politically motivated judges. The electoral collage, a mechanism
that was supposed to prevent the majority from ignoring the will of the
minority instead became a tool for the minority to ignore the will of the
majority. The list is long.

As an outside observer, I really hope the US can pull through its current
crisis (the world could do with fewer empires, but I don't particulalarly want
the stage to be left for China or Russia instead). But as far as I can tell,
it requires not only that the US changes, but also that it changes the ways in
which it can change. That's a tall order considering the current state of
affairs.

------
11thEarlOfMar
[https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/12875467381069824...](https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/1287546738106982400)

------
ahelwer
This phenomenon was also described by Foucault, and is now usually called
Foucault's Boomerang[0]:

 _" It should never be forgotten", Foucault said, "that while colonization,
with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously
transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable
boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the
apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial
models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could
practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on
itself”_

On a practical note there isn't anything mystical or karmic about this. If you
have a bunch of people with experience acting in a certain way in an overseas
setting, and then those same people come back to positions of power in a
domestic setting, they're going to act according to their past experience. If
you have a surplus of weapons, armor, and vehicles developed for overseas
engagements being given out to domestic police forces, they will be used
according to their design.

Sometimes the link is even direct and explicit: Israel trains American police
forces in tactics they've developed in Palestine[1].

[0] [https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/foucaults-
boom...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/foucaults-boomerang-
new-military-urbanism/)

[1] [https://progressive.org/dispatches/us-police-trained-by-
isra...](https://progressive.org/dispatches/us-police-trained-by-israel-
communities-of-color-paying-price-shahshahani-cohen-191007/)

~~~
pattusk
_A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the
result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or
an internal colonialism, on itself_

I keep thinking a lot of today's identity politics are the direct result of
colonialism and its racial hierarchies. A lot of post-Apartheid South Africa's
affirmative policies transferred some of the priviledges of the former whites
to the groups that Apartheid had marginalized, but the legitimacy of
identities developed by a colonial system were never really questioned.
(Saying this as a coloured man, who still can't see how such a category could
ever be considered meaningful).

You could even say that affirmative action evolved as a kind of colonial
science of imperial management. Following brutal colonial repression and
subsequent rebellion in the late 19th century European empires adopted a
softer type of rule that - on the surface - provided more advantage or more
recognition to colonized people. Japan itself learned the technique from
Europe and implemented a similar ruling style for its Empire until WWII,
giving more visibility to Manchu, Koreans... and representing itself as a
multicultural Empire. A historian called the USSR the "Affirmative Action
Empire"[0] because this was their preferred way to maintain control over
minorities while giving them the sense that they could "make it" in the Soviet
Union.

I think affirmative action dates back to the 60's in the US, which follows its
rise as a global empire with the Japanese occupation, Korean War, Vietnam War
and influence over South America...

[0][https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Affirmative_Action_...](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Affirmative_Action_Empire.html?id=rdlSX2hsb1kC)

------
dontcarethrow2
Empires fall. Always. Good riddance. Either fall or transition into a normal
state. Quit wasting time imperializing.

------
krakatau1
First comment is good:

 _Always appreciate your insights Patrick, but you are completely off base
here. USA has far fewer working age combat veterans now than it did in the
1950s through 1980s, and violence isn 't anywhere near the levels that
pervaded American society from the late 1960s through early 1990s. Trump's
harshly criticized immigration policy is quite tame - compare it to the mass
deportations under Roosevelt and Eisenhower.

The scenes in Portland and elsewhere are completely understandable - organized
black clad rioters are attacking federal buildings. Is the government supposed
to let them storm the buildings? No government would allow such a thing to
happen, though perhaps the USA will.

America is a dying country, her people destined to be a small & hated minority
surrounded by masses of her former subjects. Your own state legislature even
recently voted to legalize discrimination against people like you (Assembly
Constitutional Amendment No. 5)._

~~~
blahbhthrow3748
> surrounded by masses of her former subjects

You're not supposed to say that part out loud /s

------
khawkins
>When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s
with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the
Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that’s
empire coming home.

The federal agents in Portland are using technology to reduce harm. Over 50
nights they have had mobs trying to come in and destroy a federal courthouse,
but instead of reenacting the Boston Massacre, at worst there has been non-
life threatening injuries.

Empires and countries grow weak when they divide against themselves. This is
obvious, and the main way power structures fall apart. Articles like this are
trying to further this division by suggesting that trying to keep a mob from
destroying courthouses is authoritarian. Would Putin be so patient as to allow
mobs to lay siege to a courthouse for 50 days?

It's unbelievable how hyperbolic the rhetoric has gotten on this issue. My
guess is that people like the author are not actually seeing what's happening
in Portland. He's seeing what the federal agents are doing, but not what the
mob does to provoke these responses. I won't go so far as to say the city is
burning down, but if the federal agents left the courthouse to the mob, it
would be burned to the ground that very day.

------
lucraft
> Empire is a spectrum or a continuum, not an either/or proposition, and it’s
> a little bit like the old saying about pornography: You know it when you see
> it. The United States is an empire, and nobody who works seriously on the
> subject of empire would be likely to argue otherwise.

What does "empire" mean? I thought it meant "a group of nations or peoples
ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign or government"
(from dictionary.com) but clearly he's not using it in this fashion. Is it now
another word for hegemon?

If the concept of empire is a spectrum would that mean the US is a very large
but relatively very weak empire, as it exerts a lot of influence but little
direct control over a lot of its "territory" in the style of other past
empires? Does that mean Luxembourg is an empire now, but only at a very very
low level of empire?

I guess there's Puerto Rico (and maybe more like that?) – but I don't think
this is the sense he means it.

He talks about global military bases making an empire: as both the US and UK
have bases in Germany and Bahrain, does that mean that Germany and Bahrain are
both part of overlapping US and UK empires? Empires can overlap? Or is the UK
too weak and powerless to make an empire - and that means there's now no such
thing as a small empire? Does empire just mean "Very powerful and influential
country"?

Before I read this article I thought I knew what an empire was and would know
it when I see it – now I feel have no idea what an empire is...

I don't mind changing the meanings of words when it makes them more useful -
what specific concept beyond "Very powerful and influential" does "empire" now
identify?

~~~
free_rms
Undisputed hegemon over large portions of the world.

I think you're hung up on the PR fictions -- it used to be, empires would
indulge in the fiction of an absolute authority vested in the emperor when of
course it was more complicated than that with feudal and tributary
relationships. Now, in this political era, we spin things the other direction.

~~~
lucraft
That's interesting! So that would mean that as we've studied empires we've
realized that they were never particularly about ruling countries directly as
we thought (and so as the word originally meant), the important identifying
concept behind them was hegemony, power and influence?

~~~
free_rms
There's a continuum between direct central administration and tributary/vassal
status. The Roman Empire, for example, often had big chunks of land that were
entirely run by local people, but were 'part of the Roman Empire' as far as
public perception. Look strong and all that. (this went back and forth in
different places at different times, sometimes there was very strong central
bureaucracy).

The US, by contrast, insists that we're merely allies with all of these
countries that host more US military power than they even have domestically,
only buy US weapons, trade using our currency, scrupulously respect US
intellectual property law, vote with us in the UN nearly 100% of the time..
it's a different political posture for a different time.

