Revisiting To Dare More Boldly; The Ten Rules of Political Risk Analysis
Rule Number One: "We Are The Risk"
In mafia terms I am a ‘made man’ in one of the most elite clubs in the world. Through a series of lucky accidents, at a very early age I was made a Life Member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, the ultimate American establishment bastion. Ironically, it was in this ‘holiest of holies,’ this inner sanctum of America’s elite, that I was exposed to a graphic lack of self-knowledge that does much to explain why US foreign policy has been such a mess over the past generation.
While attending a meeting during America’s brief unipolar moment, the members of the task force I was serving on were tasked with listing the world’s ten paramount political risks. Being young and brash at the time, I had the temerity to mention that American political sclerosis ought to be on the list, as the sole superpower’s failure to get much done politically was bound to effect much else in the world at large.
My temerity was met with a mixture of bemusement, consternation, and, above all, an arrogant froideur. The great and the good literally laughed in my face, as it was beyond their comprehension that home-grown problems in their own country might themselves pose risks for the rest of the world in general. They found it literally impossible to think beyond their own parochial preconceptions regarding both the innate ‘goodness’ of the United States, as well as what was to them its self-evident superiority in every case. I was arrogantly told that I was there to evaluate the rest of the world, and not the United States, as though my own country was somehow immune from serious analysis.
This blinkered view does an awful lot to explain the catastrophic failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Looking critically inward rather than outward is not something human beings of any sort are particularly adept at. It is always far simpler to identify what is wrong with other countries than to take a disconcerting look in the mirror. For far too many political risk analysts, the discipline is merely the understanding of the frailties of other people.
As the story of Sejanus and and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes startlingly clear, geopolitical analysts have, like most people, a terrible time at looking at themselves in the mirror, failing to see that the society they love and are a part of can itself can be a major source of political risk. For the Roman Empire, one the most successful political organisations ever created, was largely destroyed from within. Most analysts over the centuries of its long decline fell prey to this parochial fallacy that the world they were part of had no flaws worth analysing. It would behoove Americans who love their country to do better, be braver, and see more clearly.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For it was Sejanus, more than any other historical Roman figure, who is unwittingly the most to blame for the fall of Rome, and the world it dominated. Born in 20 BC, Sejanus’s family came from the high-born knightly ranks of Roman society; his father Strabo served the Emperor Augustus as one of two Praetorian Prefects, commanders of the Praetorian Guard, a military unit somewhat akin to the US Secret Service, that was formed by the Emperor in 27 BC to personally protect the imperial family from security threats.
However, once Sejanus joined his father as a prefect in 14 AD, during the reign of the second Emperor, Tiberius, what had begun as a secret service morphed into something both far more powerful and far more malevolent. Supremely capable and supremely ruthless, Sejanus set about fundamentally transforming the guard, making it an unaccountable domestic intelligence and paramilitary service.
Between 14-31 AD, Sejanus centralised the Praetorian Guard’s administration. Overturning Augustus’s wise decision to keep the guard dispersed throughout Rome in multiple, small, garrisons and to always have two guard Prefects (both measures expressly designed to keep it in check), Sejanus instead increased the size of the guard to 12,000, concentrating it in a single, massive compound, under the command of only one Prefect—himself. He had done nothing less than to create an important new source of political power within the Roman Empire, one that was largely beyond anyone’s control.
Sejanus rose steadily, becoming the indispensable confidant of Tiberius, and eventually the second most important man in the Empire. When the unpopular Tiberius wearied of life in the capital and moved his personal entourage to the island of Capri in 26 AD, it was Sejanus who stayed behind in Rome, becoming the de facto Prime Minister, in control of the day-to-day administration.
In typical Roman fashion, near-absolute power corrupted Sejanus absolutely. It is likely that he murdered the Emperor’s son, Drusus the Younger, his great rival for Tiberius’s ear. Drusus, who was being groomed by Tiberius as his heir, was deeply suspicious of Sejanus, decrying his tyrannical impulses and wicked influence on his father. The Roman historian Tacitus records that by 23 AD the rivalry between the two reached its climax, with Drusus physically striking the proud Sejanus during one particularly heated argument.
Sejanus was by then actively plotting against Drusus, seducing his wife Livilla along the way. With her connivance, Drusus was slowly poisoned to death by the pair; he died in September of that same year. With no rivals left to impede him, and with Tiberius disconnected from reality in Capri (Sejanus controlled all information passing between the out-of-the-loop Emperor and Rome), Sejanus’s rise to absolute power seemed inevitable.
Backed by the unquestioning loyalty and power of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus instituted a reign of terror in Rome, initiating a series of Stalin-like show trials of opposition Senators. In 31 AD, Sejanus reached the apogee of his power, sharing a consulship with the emperor himself and becoming betrothed to his partner in crime, Livilla. But, dramatically, toward the end of that year, Sejanus fell as rapidly as he had risen, the exact reasons for which continue to baffle modern historians.
However, a preponderance of modern historical thinking has it that when Tiberius finally heard in Capri the extent to which Sejanus had already usurped his power in Rome, and belatedly sensing the danger to himself and the imperial family, Tiberius took drastic steps to swiftly remove Sejanus from power. Sejanus was dramatically arrested and strangled without trial, after being condemned to death by an emboldened Senate. His body was humiliatingly dumped down the Germonian Steps in Rome, where the people desecrated it. It was the brutal end to a brutal man.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
However, though Sejanus himself may have been gone, the internal decay he set in motion would contribute, centuries later, to the end of perhaps the most powerful and enduring political entity that the world has ever known. For the story of internal decay, of societies being unable to see themselves clearly, has an ancient lineage.
In spite of his own grisly end, Sejanus’s creation, the transformed Praetorian Guard, lived on and on, becoming the Frankenstein’s monster of the Roman Empire. Retaining its power despite its Prefect’s fall from grace, the guard came to play a pernicious and increasingly bloody role in the Empire’s history, serving as a primary source of its internal political destabilisation.
In 41 AD, conspirators centred around the guard and the Senate killed the mad Caligula. The Praetorians themselves placed the supposed idiot (he was hardly that) Claudius on the vacant throne, feeling they could control him as a puppet to further their selfish ends. Tradition has it that they found him cowering behind a drape, fearing that the guard would be finishing him off next, when instead the Praetorians offered him the throne.
The guard’s destabilising influence became endemic. Proving to be a domestic political force capable of causing great chaos, it gravely weakened the Roman Empire from within. After the suicide of the last Julio-Claudian emperor, Nero, in 68 AD, the guard prefect Gaius Nymphidius Sabinus failed in an effort to make himself the founder of a new dynasty. Just a year later, the guard assassinated the Emperor Galba after he refused to give them yet another pay raise.
In 193 AD, in one of the most remarkable acts in the whole of Roman history, Didius Julianus actually purchased the throne from the guard—which the Praetorians were auctioning off following their killing of the Emperor Pertinax—for an astronomical sum of money. In the early third century, the Emperor Caracalla was murdered and replaced on the throne by the Praetorian Prefect Marcus Opellius Macrinus. It had come to this. The guard had finally made on of their own ruler over all the Empire.
Throughout all this time, the Praetorian Guard remained steadfastly focused upon its own specific and narrow interests, endlessly agitating for pay raises and zealously tending to its perks and privileges; the overall interests of Rome were not its concern. Finally, in the fourth century, the able Emperor Constantine had the good sense to abolish the Praetorian Guard. But the damage had been done. The guard had stunted the organic development of Roman domestic political life for centuries. It was this home-grown weakness, directly springing from Sejanus’s ambitions, that directly led to the downfall of Rome and nothing less than the eclipse of centuries of western civilisation.
Over these centuries, generations of Romans did not see the vital political risk link between domestic decay and the fatal weakening of the Roman state itself, which seemed at the time (as all dominant powers do) as if it would last forever. They were unable or unwilling to look clearly in the mirror, and it was their doom. Let us very much hope it is not ours.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For this is not some archaic, ancient problem, having no bearing on the world that we live in today. Instead, the story of Sejanus and the Fall of Rome presents us with a vital piece of the puzzle as to what it takes to understand our world. Our first rule, then, must be the ability to calmly and unemotionally assess the society we live in, warts and all, and to evaluate its strengths, and particularly its weaknesses. For as was true of Rome so it is for the West today; we are the political risk.