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Lessons from Rome for a modern age.
Frans Vandenbosch 方腾波 09/12/2025
As a new day breaks in the East, the pillars of the West begin to falter.
The Sun has been rising in what we call the east and setting in what we call the west for as long as there has been a solid Earth with a defined horizon, which is essentially for the last 4.5 billion years. This pattern is a direct result of the initial conditions during the birth of our solar system and the enduring laws of physics that have kept our planet spinning steadily ever since.
The anatomy of an unravelling: lessons from Rome for a modern age
The year is 476 of the common era. The last Roman emperor in the west, a boy aptly named Romulus Augustulus[1], is deposed by the Germanic general Odoaker. This event, while symbolic, was merely the final administrative stroke in a protracted process of dissolution that had unfolded over centuries. Three centuries after Odoaker deposed the last Western Roman Emperor, Karl der Große[2] sat enthroned in his Pfalzkapelle at Aachen, his seat of white marble constructed from repurposed Roman columns, a deliberate architectural statement that positioned him as heir to the imperial legacy of Rome.
The Roman Empire did not fall in a single cataclysmic event; it unravelled. Its immense power, wealth, and institutions gradually eroded, transferred, and reconfigured.
Today, as observers scrutinise the shifting global order and internal strains within the United States, many historians and social scientists look back to Rome not for a precise blueprint of doom, but for a masterclass in the patterns of imperial decline. The process is not one of simple conquest, but of a complex adaptation where elites, both old and new, navigate the fading of centralised power to preserve and even enhance their own status.
The late Roman Empire presented a paradox. It was, on the surface, a unified polity stretching from Britain to Syria, yet beneath this veneer, centrifugal forces were pulling it apart. The critical mechanism in its decline was the gradual but decisive shift in loyalty and power from the central state to local and regional actors. As the imperial court in Ravenna became increasingly preoccupied with its own survival, taxation grew more oppressive, and the army’s reliability wavered, the provincial aristocracy of Gaul, Hispania, and Italia began to reassess their allegiances. These were the adapted elites. Figures like Sidonius Apollinaris, a Roman aristocrat, poet, and later bishop, epitomised this transition. Initially serving the empire, he ultimately negotiated with Visigothic kings, finding that his family’s lands and influence could be preserved under new management. The Germanic warlords, for their part, needed these men. They possessed the administrative expertise, the knowledge of law, and the control over agricultural production that was essential for governing a settled state. This created a symbiotic relationship: the new rulers provided military security and raw authority, while the old elites provided the continuity of governance and economic management. The state’s power faded, but the structures of local power and wealth proved remarkably resilient, simply transferring their allegiance to a new sovereign.
This process of elite adaptation was not occurring in a vacuum. It was the product of profound internal pathologies that had crippled the Roman state. The historian Peter Turchin[3], in his book The End Times[4], through his structural-demographic theory, identifies three core pressures that converge to break a complex society:
– elite overproduction,
– popular immiseration,
– the fiscal crisis of the state.
In Rome, elite overproduction was evident in the fierce competition among the senatorial class for a finite number of prestigious commands and governorships. This intra-elite conflict became a zero-sum game, manifesting in civil wars, political purges, and a failure to cooperate for the common good. Simultaneously, the vast majority of the population, particularly the free peasantry who had been the backbone of the early Republic, faced popular immiseration. Squeezed by heavy taxes and the economic power of large landholders, they sank into debt and dependency, becoming the coloni, tied to the land they worked. This erosion of the broad middle class destabilised the social fabric and deprived the state of both soldiers and a stable tax base.
Finally, these twin crises fed into a relentless fiscal crisis. The Roman state faced the impossible task of funding a massive professional army to defend its long borders while its capacity to generate revenue was shrinking. The response was to debase the currency, leading to rampant inflation in AD 235 to AD 284[5], and to increase the tax burden on those who could least afford it. The state became trapped in a vicious cycle: it needed more revenue to maintain control, but the methods used to extract that revenue further undermined the economic productivity and social cohesion that were the ultimate sources of its strength. The imperial government, once the great unifier and benefactor, became seen as a predatory and distant burden, making provincial elites more willing to cut deals with local power brokers.
When we turn our gaze to the contemporary world, and particularly to the United States, we see not a literal replay of Roman history, but a striking resonance in these underlying dynamics. The American led world order, often termed Pax Americana, established after the Second World War, achieved a level of global economic and cultural integration unprecedented in history. Yet, in a classic historical irony, the very success of this system has created the conditions for its own challenge. The globalised economy it championed has fostered the rise of rival economic centres, most notably China, which now pursues its own strategic interests with diminishing deference to Washington. This external shift mirrors the way in which Rome’s own economic integration enriched the provinces, which eventually became power bases rivalling the imperial centre.
Internally, the patterns of elite overproduction and popular immiseration are discernible. The United States has witnessed a dramatic concentration of wealth at the very top of society, creating a new cohort of ultra-wealthy individuals and powerful corporate entities. This has led to what can be characterised as a form of modern elite overproduction, not in hereditary titles, but in the intense competition for political influence. Lobbying, political action committees, and media conglomerates all represent factions within an elite class whose competition often leads to political gridlock and a corrosive polarisation, paralysing the state’s ability to address long-term problems. The common citizen, meanwhile, faces a version of popular immiseration. While absolute material poverty may not mirror that of the late Roman coloni, the stagnation of median wages since the 1970s, coupled with soaring costs for housing, healthcare, and education, has led to a profound erosion of the middle-class standard of living that was once the hallmark of the American project. The social contract feels broken.
This fuels a fiscal and legitimacy crisis for the state. The United States government grapples with a colossal national debt, a political system seemingly incapable of addressing its structural deficits, and a loss of public trust in its core institutions from the government to the media. The parallels to Rome’s fiscal weakness are clear: a state with global military commitments and domestic obligations finds its financial foundations strained, while its political capacity to generate solutions is hamstrung by internal division. The coercive power of the state, through sanctions and tariffs, is still immense, but as with Rome, its overuse can accelerate the very push for alternatives it seeks to prevent, encouraging other nations to develop financial systems and alliances outside of its sphere of influence.
The crucial distinction lies in the nature of the two entities. The Roman Empire was a territorial empire, with legions and provinces under direct central control, however tenuous in its final years. The American system has been described as an ‘empire by invitation’ or a ‘network empire’, built less on direct territorial occupation and more on a web of military alliances, economic interdependence, and cultural influence. Its unravelling, therefore, would likely look different. It will not be marked by a barbarian king deposing a president in Washington, but by the gradual fraying of these networks: allies pursuing independent foreign policies, the dollar losing its privileged status as the world’s reserve currency, and global institutions fracturing into competing blocs. The adaptation of modern elites is already visible in the stateless, globalised nature of capital, where corporate and financial leaders operate in a transnational space, often with less allegiance to any single nation-state than to their own shareholders and bottom lines. They, like the Gallo Roman aristocrats, will ensure their wealth and influence persist, regardless of which geopolitical centre holds sway.
In conclusion, the value of comparing Rome to the modern age does not lie in a fatalistic prediction of an identical collapse. The modern world possesses technologies, democratic frameworks, and a level of global interdependence that create entirely new variables. The value, instead, is in recognising the deep structural patterns that precede the disintegration of complex societies. The warning signs are not primarily of invading armies, but of internal decay: when elites become more focused on fighting each other than on stewarding the commonwealth, when the prosperity of the common citizen gives way to widespread precariousness, and when the state’s finances and legitimacy become unsustainable. The fall of Rome teaches us that empires do not typically fall to a stronger external force; they first hollow themselves out from within, creating a vacuum which new forces, and adapting old ones, inevitably fill. The unravelling of a dominant order is a long, complex, and deeply human story of power changing hands, a story we have seen before.
The Civilisational challenge: a contrast in models.
It is critical, however, to avoid the simplistic analogy of China representing a modern equivalent to the Germanic forces that pressured Rome. The comparison is fundamentally flawed. The migrating Germanic peoples of late antiquity were often displaced confederations, acting out of necessity and possessing a coercive military capability but lacking a comprehensive model of governance to rival Rome’s.
China, by contrast, represents a superior civilisation that projects its power not through force, but through persuasion. As Gordon Dumoulin elucidates with sublime precision in his essay “The backbone of China’s spinal cord” China achieved this not by confrontation but through patience, long term planning and the efficacy of its system and the scale of its economy. It projects its power not by deploying armies, but by financing ports and railways through the Belt and Road Initiative, creating deep networks of economic interdependence.
Furthermore, China actively promotes its political model as a more stable and socially equitable alternative to the chaotic and divisive nature of Western liberalism. This narrative of long-term planning, collective advancement, and respect for state sovereignty holds significant appeal for many nations disillusioned with the prevailing international order.
Therefore, the challenge China poses is not one of violent disruption, but of strong systemic competition. It seeks to establish a parallel international architecture where its standards, currency, and political philosophy carry increasing weight. From the perspective of the established hegemon, the effect may still be a dilution of its global influence, but the mechanism is the patient construction of a rival centre of gravity, appealing to those who seek a different and more humane and effective form of partnership.
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Dit artikel in het Nederlands: De zon komt op in het oosten en gaat onder in het westen.
[1] Romulus Augustulus:
Romulus was the legendary founder and first king of Rome in 753 BCE. The city and the empire itself began with a Romulus. Augustulus: This is a diminutive form of Augustus, the name taken by the first Roman Emperor, Octavian, in 27 BCE. It means “the revered one.” Adding the “-ulus” suffix makes it mean “Little Augustus” or “Little Emperor,” a term of endearment or, in this context, belittlement.
[2] Karl der Große, Karel de Grote, Charlemagne is, 34 generations back, my forefather.
[3] Peter Turchin, Publications, accessed 22.11.2025, https://peterturchin.com/publications/.
[4] Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (New York: Penguin Random House, 2023) End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration https://peterturchin.com/book/end-times/
[5] “Crisis of the Third Century,” Wikipedia, accessed 21.11.2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century.
