Rome fell. Will West follow suit?

 This provocative short book adapts this approach with a novel twist. It draws a comparison between the West in 1999, the zenith of its confidence, and Rome exactly 1,600 years earlier, in 399—just decades before the empire’s collapse.

Declinism is in fasthion agarin. 

Books predicting the unstoppable rise of autocratic strongmen and the death of democracy proliferate. There is much talk of the “Thucydides trap”: the inevitability of a clash between a rising power and an established one, as Athens challenged Sparta in the fifth century bc.

dissent from the analysis familiar since Edward Gibbon of an empire in gradual decline almost from its inception under Augustus. Rome, they argue, was as strong as ever at the turn of the fifth century ad.

As Gibbon laboured to explain 250 years ago, the eastern empire based in Constantinople continued for almost another millennium. 

Yet the analogy with Rome’s decline and fall is ultimately unconvincing. 

The Economist 25 May 2023

https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/05/25/rome-fell-will-the-modern-day-west-follow-suit 

Why Empires Fall. By John Rapley and Peter Heather. Yale University Press; 

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300273724/why-empires-fall/

Fimbulvintern, Ragnarök och klimatkrisen år 536–537 e.Kr.

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2022/01/fimbulvintern-ragnarok-och-klimatkrisen.html

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of Empire

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2019/08/1177-bc-year-civilization-collapsed.html