Good day. This is the Friends of History Debating Society. We're in Lundinium on a beautiful spring evening.

Centurions have already gathered. They're eager to hear how the war is going in the Gulf.

They want to see whether the investment they made in making Rome an empire is being

echoed or abused by the American inheritors of Roman institutions, the military, the courts,

the Senate, certainly the emperor's position,

and of the underlying dependence on the approval of the mob,

we also would call them the democracy, the demos.

And Germanicus is here to comment.

These are large issues that we're dealing with right now because

America is locked into a war that it did not prepare its demos, its mob, its public,

and is not now preparing it for what comes next.

Europe is enjoying commenting in the 21st century.

We're here in the first century AD with no profound concerns.

The springtime has arrived.

There are no messages from Rome that are unsettling.

We can see the future, and that future is very positive for the Roman

Empire for the next century at least. And it will last much longer than the expectation here in

the first century as we know this. We can see it. At the same time, we have concern about the

American Empire, which at this point has reached a critical turning point, not the end critical, not the end of everything critical, critical in that it can go badly or it can go very badly.

It reminds myself of the choices that were poorly decided at the end of the Vietnam War,

and that those poor decisions led to the catastrophe of the killing fields of Cambodia

and the breakdown of confidence in any of the states of Southeast Asia.

...