Veni, Vidi, and Then What?

In the good old, brutal days, an empire faced a clean, honest choice: it devoured its rivals, or its rivals devoured it. Victory paid dividends you could weigh and count — booty, tribute, and slaves.

Statue of George Washington in Common Park, Boston. Source: Getty Images

Tuesday, July 7th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from Youghal, Ireland

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Yesterday we sat scratching our heads over a riddle that ought to trouble every citizen: how is it that the most colossal war-machine ever assembled — fueled on more treasure than the next ten nations heaped together — could go swaggering into two wars nobody obliged it to fight, against two flyblown and impecunious little countries, and come limping home, twice, licked?

These were not wars of necessity. They were wars of appetite, indulged like a fat man’s second dessert; they could give him a brief sugar high...or a diabetic coma. They cost trillions the Republic did not have. Worse than the money, they laid bare, for all the world to snicker at, the sheer, absurd incompetence of the whole apparatus.

Reaching for an insight: people get good at what they do; the US got to be very good at pumping up its economy on fake money…and then borrowing it back from foreigners. By contrast, its post-WWII wars were embarrassing.

Robert McNamara, who presided over the abattoir of Vietnam, lived long enough to fess up in his dotage that the war had been a blunder — we should have talked with the Vietnamese instead of trying to ‘bomb them back to the Stone Age.’ He actually shed a tear for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people his war had killed. It was a rare and useful sort of penitence. We should not hold our breath waiting for its like from Pete Hegseth, a much less thoughtful person. But let us ask the only question that finally matters: will the hanging judge of History render a kinder verdict on the attack on Iran? We doubt it.

Herewith, in the spirit of impertinent curiosity, a brief meditation on the American record since WWII.

In the good old, brutal days, an empire faced a clean, honest choice: it devoured its rivals, or its rivals devoured it. Victory paid dividends you could weigh and count — booty, tribute, and slaves. Consider Rome, where the ambitious young man got his character, his cash, and his consulship the manly way, at the point of a sword. Veni, vidi, vici, scribbled Caesar — he came, saw, and helped himself to the whole of Gaul. He came home with plunder, human chattel, and, most importantly, an army that loved him and cared less for Rome.

After centuries of murder conducted on a heroic scale, Rome reached its zenith around 100 A.D. Thereafter the triumphs grew scarce and, most often, defensive. Having conquered so much territory, the Empire spent its next three hundred years clutching at it — by treachery and butchery — and eventually losing the whole shebang.

The English contrived something cleverer. Theirs was the first empire of the Machine Age. They hauled raw stuff into British mills, transmuted it into finished goods, and peddled those goods to every bazaar and shopping street on the planet. The manufacturers made money. Wages climbed. The old island grew rich. Trade rode the sea, and Britannia, as the anthem boasted, ruled the waves.

Into these outsized boots America stepped — the left foot in 1919, the right in 1945 — and commenced to strut. With the most productive and efficient factories ever built, she was the source of nearly half the market output of the entire human species. The American president, JFK, was the best-loved (and perhaps the most frequently, if you believe the gossip) man alive. And almost everyone was California Dreamin’.

Then, in 1971, came the counterfeit dollar, and the noble Republic quietly rotted into a shady empire of finance. Today she claims less than a quarter of world output — by some reckonings as little as a twelfth. Her rulers are likelier to be cursed upon than saluted. They still manage the veni and the vidi well enough; it is the vici that eludes them. She is good at finance, not war.

We put the case plainly in our 2006 volume The Empire of Debt: here was the first superpower ever to fund itself on debt. It did not conquer its rivals — it borrowed from them. Its dollars were snapped up eagerly the world over. But it was a pernicious swindle: to print a dollar cost virtually nothing. Yet each one was a solemn IOU redeemable against the very goods and comforts Americans themselves depended on.

All living things breathe in and breathe out. They enjoy their hour in the sun and then endure their long, sweating night of terror and dissolution. Decay, death, the final curtain — these are as certain as the birth that preceded them. Empires, the historians tell us, run about 250 years — that grim little milestone the United States has just this year trundled past.

By our accounting the empire tilted towards decline some quarter-century ago, when George W. Bush proclaimed his “War on Terror” — a milestone of its own, being the Republic’s first war against nobody in particular. And here is the maddening part: it would have been child’s play to keep the old ship off the rocks a while longer.

On the money question, the whole trick was to keep faith with honest coin. That alone would have forestalled the Himalaya of debt now towering over the country like a landslide waiting to happen. And it should have been simple, for the Constitution forbade “bills of credit.” Dean Clancy:

Read in conjunction with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and the obligation-of-contracts clause (Art. I, sec. 10, cl. 1), we can identify five monetary policies that are constitutionally requisite in the United States:

The basic unit is the dollar, a silver coin containing 371.25 grains of pure silver.

Only gold or silver coins and currency (banknotes fully backed by and readily redeemable in specie) may serve as legal tender.

No state may issue coins or currency.

No one may counterfeit U.S. Government-issued coins or currency.

Neither the states nor Congress may issue fiat money notes (’bills of credit...’).

Instead, in 1971, the Republic swapped its gold-backed dollars for IOUs backed by thin air, and reaped the aforementioned Empire of Debt.

As for the foreign adventures, old George Washington had left, in his Farewell Address of 1796, a set of plain instructions. Stephen Kinzer:

It is poignant to read today what he warned us against two centuries ago: “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”; “frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests”; “overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty”; “the mischiefs of foreign intrigue”; “love of power and proneness to abuse it”; “excessive partiality for one nation and excessive dislike of another”; “the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists”; “projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives.”

Poor Washington knew what he was up against — not foreign devils but domestic fools. He had no illusions that his warning would take. Set beside the patriotic flapdoodle bellowed at us on the 250th anniversary, his own last words ring like a man talking, wearily and without hope, to a brick wall:

“I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I would wish,” he wound up.

He need not have worried on that score. They didn’t.

Regards,

Bill Bonner