The Last Romans: The Decline of the Western World

Two thousand six hundred years ago, a Jewish exile standing before the most powerful king on earth described a vision of world history so precise that critics have argued it must have been written after the fact.It wasn't.And the part that describes our moment has barely begun to be taken seriously.The vision was of a statue — brilliant and terrible, built from gold to silver to bronze to iron, descending to feet of iron and clay that could not hold together. Each material represented an empire. The sequence ran through Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. And Rome, the vision said, would not truly end. It would fracture. Its inheritance would persist — strong and brittle, powerful in parts, unable to fully cohere.Look at the western world in the early twenty-first century and tell me what you see.The Last Romans is a reckoning with the most important question of our age: whether the greatest political inheritance in human history — the rule of law, individual rights, democratic accountability, the freedom of conscience — can survive the convergence of threats now bearing down on it simultaneously.From the post-9/11 strategic trap to the hollowing of western institutions. From China's hundred-year marathon to Russia's wounded revanchism. From the dollar's soft underbelly to the shadow fleet financing the adversary coalition. From the demographic winter to the fiscal time bomb to the culture war consuming the political attention the West can least afford to spend.And then — with the analytical precision and the moral seriousness the moment demands — what can be done about it.This is not a book of despair. The feet are still standing. The concrete that holds them has a hidden property that the prophecy itself may have encoded: iron and clay, under the right conditions, bond with a strength that neither alone can produce.The choice that remains is whether anyone is doing the engineering Read more