Once upon a time \u2013 actually, in the sixth century B.C.E. \u2013 there was a king of Persia called Cyrus, known as the Great for his conquest of most of the world between the Hindu Kush Mountains and Macedonia.\u00a0 Cyrus is the foreign ruler mentioned most frequently and admiringly in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanach.\u00a0 To hold together the largest and most diverse of the ancient empires, he granted conquered nations considerable autonomy, respected local religions and customs, and \u2013 here is where the Bible gives him rave reviews \u2013 permitted national communities abducted and made captive by previous emperors to return to their ancestral homes.\u00a0 Cyrus allowed the Jews, driven into exile by their neo-Babylonian conquerors, to return to Palestine.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/King-Cyrus-the-great-Fallacy.jpg\")
<\/a>King Cyrus the Great<\/p><\/div>\n
These deeds earned the \u201cgood emperor\u201d such renown that the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem declared him to be no less than the Anointed One: The Messiah.\u00a0 At the same time, Cyrus made war non-stop against imperial competitors and used a rich assortment of violent tools, including massacres, enslavement, and an eclectic range of tortures, to punish rebels against his rule.[i]<\/a>\u00a0 Worse yet, since his reign did not end the system generating war and repression, his relative forbearance proved short-lived, and his successors, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes, ruled bloodily until they were themselves conquered by Alexander of Macedon (another great killer dubbed the Great).<\/p>\n In the case of the incoming Biden administration, the great danger is that figures like Blinken and Sullivan will attempt to correct President Trump\u2019s deviations from the norm of \u201cresponsible internationalism\u201d without recognizing that Trump also deviated, albeit partially and inconsistently, from the norm of imperialist expansion.\u00a0 Ever since Harry Truman\u2019s presidency, mainstream Democrats have offered up a combination of relatively progressive social policies at home and aggressive, world-dominating schemes abroad \u2013 a contradiction that assumed its most glaring form under President Lyndon Johnson, who authored both the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War.\u00a0 (Joe Biden himself voted to approve the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, as Obama\u2019s vice-president, helped conduct the disastrous invasion of Libya in 2016.)<\/p>\n An essential feature of this two-headed policy is to blur the distinction between cooperative international activities such as participation in climate change treaties and empire-building activities like the maintenance of military bases in more than 80 nations and the promotion of NATO expansion. This blurriness becomes blinding where an alleged adversary like China is involved.\u00a0 If one wonders what legitimate interests or needs should motivate U.S. policies in the Asia-Pacific region, for example, the conventional answer asserts a need to cooperate with nations other than China to maintain an Asian \u201cbalance of power.\u201d This response precisely recapitulates the British Empire\u2019s response to the rise of German power in 19th<\/sup>century Europe.\u00a0 It means continuing to play the Great Game of imperialist politics, which in the twentieth century gave us two world wars that killed approximately 100 million people and maimed twice as many.<\/p>\n King Cyrus notwithstanding, there are no good emperors.\u00a0 It is not just bad people but bad systems that kill and destroy, and imperialism is a system that generates mass violence as part of its normal operations.[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 Furthermore, the attempt to maintain a global empire amid signs of its decline exacerbates domestic as well as international conflicts. Internal social struggles in the United States involving bitterly opposed identity groups, fanned by an unstable, authoritarian leader, and taking place during a period of environmental and economic crises, remind one strongly of the conditions accompanying the last years of other overstretched empires, beginning with Rome.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n In order to mitigate the conflicts now rending their country, the Bidenites will have to consider reductions in military and national security expenditures radical enough to support a phalanx of new social programs.\u00a0 But they are unlikely to do this unless they first recognize that the system which created and sustains the military-industrial complex is an empire that must be dismantled.\u00a0 The question confronting the new administration can therefore be reframed.\u00a0 It is how to dismantle the American empire without returning the U.S. to an isolationist \u201cFortress America\u201d stance that dooms international cooperation and invites expansion by other would-be empires.<\/p>\n A serious discussion of how to redefine America\u2019s role in the world is long overdue.\u00a0 This redefinition will surely involve very deep cuts in U.S. military expenditures and arms sales, the closure of foreign bases, and the renegotiation of multinational agreements on topics like climate change.\u00a0 But it will also require radical reform of the United Nations, the strengthening of international courts, and a \u201ccultural revolution\u201d that prepares Americans to play the role of one respected nation among many, rather than that of a global hegemon.<\/p>\n Will the Biden appointees listen to anti-imperialist voices in both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as among activists outside the two-party system?\u00a0 Will they recognize and avoid the King Cyrus fallacy?\u00a0 I have little confidence that hardened \u201cnational security\u201d officials will do the right thing, but with Mr. Trump gone, hope still flowers.\u00a0 One therefore offers a prayer of sorts: ut imperii cadunt.\u00a0 <\/em>May the U.S. Empire be dismantled as speedily and peacefully as possible!<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n [i]<\/a> See, e.g., Encyclopedia Iranica<\/em>, \u201cTorture in the Achaeminid Period.\u201d https:\/\/iranicaonline.org\/articles\/torture-achaemenid-period<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> I argue this at some length in Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed <\/em>(Routledge, 2010).<\/em><\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> For a remarkably prescient recent analysis, see Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire<\/em> (Princeton University Press, 2019).<\/p>\n __________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Will the Biden appointees listen to anti-imperialist voices in both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as among activists outside the two-party system?\u00a0 Will they recognize and avoid the King Cyrus fallacy?\u00a0 I have little confidence that hardened \u201cnational security\u201d officials will do the right thing, but with Mr. Trump gone, hope still flowers.\u00a0 One therefore offers a prayer of sorts: ut imperii cadunt.\u00a0 May the U.S. Empire be dismantled as speedily and peacefully as possible!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":178800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[867,2197,249,70],"class_list":["post-178799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anglo-america","tag-biden","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).\u00a0 His book in progress, to be published in fall 2020, is <\/em>Post-Corona Conflicts: New Sources of Struggle and Opportunities for Peace.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"