The interactive map on the right illustrates the territorial expanse of a few of the major empires. Although throughout ancient and more recent colonial history, the word “empire” was positively embraced—as in the cases of the Spanish, British or Russian empires—for Americans, the word has always had negative connotations and rarely used.

Like Rome, Britain or any of the other empires before it, America is a vast, multicultural state, burdened with an expensive and overstretched military, uneasy about its porous borders, with a messianic sense of global mission and a tendency to misunderstand and belittle foreign cultures.

Jonathan Freedland's astute historical comparison below details both the benefits and burdens Rome and America share as empires.

The New Roman Empire?

Now the United States dominates the world. Are the Americans the new Romans?
by Jonathan Freedland source>

America's policies determine economic, political, military and cultural outcomes for very large parts of the world. The most obvious similarity between Rome and the U.S. is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest budgets and finest equipment the world had seen. No one else came close. The U.S. is just as dominant—its defense budget will soon be bigger than the military spending of the next nine countries combined, allowing it to deploy forces almost anywhere on the planet at lightning speed. Throw in its technological lead, and the U.S. emerges as a power without rival.

There is a big difference, of course. Apart from the odd Puerto Rico or Guam, the U.S. does not have formal colonies, the way the Romans did. There are no American consuls or viceroys directly ruling faraway lands.

But that difference between ancient Rome and modern Washington may be less significant than it looks. After all, America has done plenty of conquering and colonizing. For some historians, the founding of America and its 19th-century push westward were no less an exercise in empire building than Rome's drive to take charge of the Mediterranean. While Julius Caesar took on the Gauls—bragging that he had slaughtered a million of them —American pioneers battled the Cherokee, the Iroquois and the Sioux.

"From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation," says Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Global Muscle
More to the point, the U.S. has military bases, or base rights, in some 40 countries—giving it the same global muscle it would enjoy if it ruled those countries directly. According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, these U.S. military bases are today's version of the imperial colonies of old. Washington may refer to them as "forward deployment", says Johnson, but they are colonies nonetheless. On this definition, there is almost no place outside America's reach.

So the U.S. may be more Roman than we realize, with garrisons in every corner of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the U.S. approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman. It's as if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be done - and today's Americans follow it religiously.

Lesson One in the Roman handbook for imperial success would be a realization that it is not enough to have great military strength: the rest of the world must know that strength—and fear it. The Romans used the propaganda technique of their time—gladiatorial games in the Colosseum—to show the world how hard they were. Today 24-hour news coverage of U.S. military operations, including video footage of smart bombs scoring direct hits, or Hollywood shoot-'em-ups at the multiplex serve the same function. Both tell the world: this empire is too tough to beat.

Superior Technology
The U.S. has learned a second lesson from Rome, realizing the centrality of technology. For the Romans, it was those famously straight roads, enabling the empire to move troops or supplies at awesome speeds—rates that would not be surpassed for well over a thousand years. It was a perfect example of how one imperial strength tends to feed another: an innovation in engineering, originally designed for military use, went on to boost Rome commercially.

Today those highways find their counterpart in the information superhighway: the Internet also began as a military tool, devised by the U.S. Defense Department, and now stands at the heart of American commerce. In the process, it is making English the Latin of its day—a language spoken across the globe. The U.S. is proving what the Romans already knew: that once an empire is a world leader in one sphere, it soon dominates in every other.

The Power of Seduction
But it is not just specific tips that the U.S. seems to have picked up from its ancient forebears. Rather, it is the fundamental approach to empire that echoes so loudly. Rome understood that, if it was to last, a world power needed to practice both hard imperialism, the business of winning wars and invading lands, and soft imperialism, the cultural and political tricks that worked not to win power but to keep it.

So Rome's greatest conquests came not at the end of a spear, but through its power to seduce conquered peoples. As Tacitus observed in Britain, the natives seemed to like togas, baths and central heating - never realizing that these were the symbols of their "enslavement".

Today the U.S. offers the people of the world a similarly coherent cultural package, a cluster of goodies that remain reassuringly uniform. It's not togas or gladiatorial games today, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Disney, all paid for in the contemporary equivalent of Roman coinage, the global hard currency of the 21st century: the dollar.

When the process works, you don't even have to resort to direct force; it is possible to rule by remote control, using friendly client states. This is a favourite technique for the contemporary U.S.—no need for colonies when you had the Shah in Iran or Pinochet in Chile to do the job for you - but the Romans got there first. They ruled by proxy whenever they could.

Not that it always worked. Rebellions against the empire were a permanent fixture, with barbarians constantly pressing at the borders. Some accounts suggest that the rebels were not always fundamentally anti-Roman; they merely wanted to share in the privileges and affluence of Roman life. If that has a familiar ring, consider this: several of the enemies who rose up against Rome are thought to have been men previously nurtured by the empire to serve as pliant allies. Need one mention former U.S. protege Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA trainee Osama bin Laden?

Heroes and Myths
Internally, too, today's U.S. would strike many Romans as familiar terrain. America's mythologizing of its past—its casting of founding fathers Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale rendering of the Boston Tea Party and the war of independence—is very Roman.

That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of manifest destiny.

There are some large differences between the two empires, of course—starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own imperialism. Most would deny it. But that may come down to the U.S.'s founding myth. For America was established as a rebellion against empire, in the name of freedom and self-government. Raised to see themselves as a rebel nation and plucky underdog, they cannot quite accept their current role as master.

Will History Repeat Itself?
One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens to all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from beginning to middle to end.

"What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years," says the Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, "is what is the optimum size for a non-territorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders, what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the Roman empire."

Anti-Americans like to believe that the "pre-emptive" operation in Iraq might be proof that the U.S. is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch. But it's just as possible that the U.S. is merely moving into what was the second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it?

Is the U.S. at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that.