I know we ended this thread but this email strikes me as worth running:
The Roman Empire (look at a map) was essentially a land locked empire. In other words the borders of the Roman Empire that had to be defended were nothing more
than lines along land borders, much like the Russian Empire. The United States is surrounded by two oceans, that is what the US has to defend.
The best measures of spending to GDP in the Roman period of decline was something like 35% of total production. During the declining British Empire it was somewhere around 30%. In the United States today it is something like 5%.
One of the key features of the period of Roman decline of the fifth and sixth centuries was sharply rising crime, such that the ability to move goods and services ground to a halt. This was the inertia that so damaged the Roman Empire. The ability to transport goods was damaged, and the military was not able to both control borders and control crime on trade routes. In contrast crime has declined rapidly in the United States since its peak in 1980.
Rome lost the ability to communicate with the extreme west of the Empire and was not fully able to absorb events as they occurred. How could that really be possible in the age of the internet, cell phone, etc.
And here is a kicker: Rome never fell.
It lost control of the Western Empire moved its capital from Rome to Constantinople (well before the fall) placing its new capital in the much more easily secured region between two bodies of water (sound familiar). The eastern empire thrived well into the 15th century at which time the rise of ocean vessels provided alternate trading routes, ended the land routes on which Constantinople depended and went into economic decline. Rome itself was reconstituted into the head of the Roman Catholic church and the seat of the Popes.
The region thrived through the period, and it was France and Britain and areas further from Rome that suffered with the loss of roads. For that matter the Carolinian Empire did much to reconstitute the West Empire, and still animates the EU today.
It is quite difficult to draw much comparison in any manner.
I take all these points. But what Edward Gibbon would say about America's turn away from Enlightenment reason to fundamentalist Christianity would probably be too racy to print even on this blog.
The Dish 