Five, four, three, and then we're off to the theater.

Two, one.

This is the Friends of History Debating Society.

I am Gaius and Germanicus is here.

We're debating by the Thames. It's a discouraging debate now because

it's nothing's vivid. There's nothing compelling. The campaigns are on repeat, waving. The war in Ukraine, well, America's lost interest and Empire.

There is a remark made by FDR in a new book by Michelle Perides about Eisenhower, in which FTR says, if it hadn't been for the

and he names them, the French and the Dutch empires in the Pacific, we wouldn't be in a war out there.

FTR disdained empires. The Dutch Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the three that were

co-terminus and had cut up most of Asia.

However, we have an American Empire now

that's following the same course of dissolution and disappointment

that those previous empires followed.

So what is it that the Romans did, that we Romans did ride that our successor empires or the

want to be successors can't get right is there a single answer

Germanicus or is this something that is particular to each case,

so there's no one answer?

It's a sort of multi-layered answer in the sense that it's an apples and oranges comparison.

The Roman Empire was a universalist empire that dominated the Ekomena, the known world.

Whereas all of the successor empires from Charlemagne, Napoleon, Spanish, British, Dutch, you name it.

They were much smaller propositions and they all suffered rather quickly in the course of a century or a

century and a half from overreach combined with the rise of rivals that put them in a position where they could no longer command whatever advantages had originally given them the room and space and opportunity to live large, right?

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