Clio's Lament
Living Through Historical Decline Isn't For the Faint of Heart
On September 11, 2001, after spending a whole day in my 2nd year of teaching in front of a TV screen watching the horror of that day unfold, I found myself driving to Carrolton for night classes at West Georgia. For some reason, they didn’t cancel classes that night.
There’s a certain intersection at Villa Rica where, as you’re stopped at the red light, you can watch all the air traffic flying into Atlanta from the west.
That evening, there were no planes in the sky.
As I stared into the empty blue, a thought crossed my mind…Is this one of THOSE moments?
I had completed my Masters in History at Old Dominion early in 2000, and what a historian means by THOSE moments isn’t just a “big news event”…9/11 certainly qualified as that by any measure, but literally one of “THOSE events” that leads to this kind of transition sentence in a historical textbook:
After a century of dominance, the United States began a long, gradual decline in prominence at the start of the 21st Century.
That thought quite literally flashed across my mind at that red light that day.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything since that would lead me to think otherwise- certainly not last week’s disgraceful display by an American President and Vice-President in the Oval Office.
In the modern world of nation-states, with democratic principles written, to some extent or another, in foundational documents and the psyches of billions of people, “decline” doesn’t have to mean disappearance. Spoiler alert: It never meant that in the past, either. Rome didn’t “fall” one sunny afternoon in the 5th Century, it actually carried forth for a millennium before morphing into another empire that lasted centuries before that changed into the modern nation-state of Turkey.
As Faulkner once famously said, the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.
But every powerful empire or nation-state has its moment in the sun, and then it begins the slow fade away. When historians tend to write on a macro scale, we focus on international turmoil and gradual shifts in power from one place to another.
The price of eggs one year really doesn’t factor into a historian’s perspective much.
But George W. Bush’s unilateral (well, bilateral with the UK) invasion of Iraq in 2003, at the cost of diminishing the international institutions the United States had built following World War II…institutions his own father had strengthened as President in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War…was strike one for the US as world hegemon.
Our election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the international turmoil of his first term was strike two.
Our re-election of Trump in November of 2024 after having rejected him in 2020 was strike three before he ever even took office again.
Spectacles like last week’s Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy are just momentary indicators of the deeper problem. We can’t be trusted to lead the world we ourselves constructed 80 years ago, nor should we expect to fulfill that role any longer, because a large enough portion of our society has become belligerent to that Wilson-Roosevelt-US created world that hasn’t had a war between major powers in 80 years, a pax Americana we shouldn’t have been so foolish to dismiss, because the horror it sprang from can be unloosed upon the world again if we’re not careful.
Who will take the lead? Honestly, I don’t know. China isn’t in a position to do it, not in its current form, and neither is the European Union. But in future years, who knows?
And so the world…drifts…turning…and turning…in the widening gyre…stumbling toward…what?
I can’t control any of that, I can only lament it. And so the Stoic in me just works on the things I can control to do what I can do to try and claw things toward a time when some new revelation can be heard.
Some more news links on recent foreign affairs:
So well-written! Thank you.