For most of my life, I have heard some version of the same warning:
America is becoming Rome.
The details change depending on who is making the argument.
Debt.
Political division.
Military overreach.
Immigration.
Corruption.
Economic inequality.
Loss of civic trust.
Cultural fragmentation.
Political violence.
An increasingly powerful central government.
The implication is usually the same:
Rome was once powerful.
Rome believed it would endure.
Rome eventually failed.
Could America follow the same path?
That comparison is hardly new. Americans have looked toward ancient Rome since the founding of the country. The architects of the American republic deliberately studied Greece and Rome, including Polybius’s description of the Roman constitutional system and its competing centers of power. Rome has therefore served both as inspiration and warning throughout American history.
But there is a problem with the popular comparison.
Rome did not simply “fall.”
And there was no single Roman failure.
The Roman Republic deteriorated centuries before the western empire itself disappeared.
Political violence increased.
Institutional norms weakened.
Personal loyalty increasingly competed with loyalty to republican institutions.
Civil wars became possible.
Generals accumulated personal military followings.
Economic and social pressures intensified.
Eventually Augustus offered Romans something many had come to value more than republican political freedom:
stability.
Centuries later, the western empire faced an entirely different collection of problems, including enormous administrative burdens, military pressures, political fragmentation, disease, demographic disruption and environmental stress. Historians continue to debate how much weight each factor deserves.
History therefore gives us no simple equation:
America + enough decadence = Rome.
That isn’t history.
It is mythology disguised as analysis.
But Rome can still ask useful questions.
And there was another people living inside Rome’s story who may give us an unusual way to ask them.
The Remi.
The People Who Chose a Different Game
The Remi were a Belgic people of northern Gaul.
When Julius Caesar entered Belgic territory in 57 BCE, many neighboring peoples prepared for war.
The Remi chose something else.
They approached Caesar.
They offered cooperation.
More importantly, they brought information.
According to Caesar, the Remi were able to explain which peoples belonged to the Belgic coalition, how many warriors they could potentially field, which groups held the greatest military reputation, and how their political relationships worked.
That was not merely diplomacy.
It was intelligence.
The Remi understood the political environment around them before committing themselves to a course of action.
They then provided Caesar with grain and other support while maintaining their own political position.
That decision placed them in direct opposition to much of Belgic Gaul.
It also placed them on a very different historical trajectory.
They Were Not Passive
It would be easy to interpret the Remi decision as cowardice.
The surviving evidence does not fit that interpretation very well.
When the Belgic coalition attacked the Remi stronghold of Bibrax, the defenders resisted an intense assault for an entire day. Caesar describes stones and missiles raining against the defenses while attackers attempted to approach the gates and undermine the walls.
Iccius, a leading Remi noble who had earlier negotiated with Caesar, commanded the defense.
Only after the situation became critical did he request Roman reinforcement.
Later Remi cavalry fought alongside Roman forces.
The elderly Remi leader Vertiscus commanded cavalry despite being so old that Caesar says he could barely remain in the saddle. He nevertheless insisted on accompanying his men and died during fighting against the Bellovaci.
The Remi therefore did not reject warfare.
They appear to have rejected unnecessary warfare.
That distinction matters.
The Long Game
The Remi wager paid off extraordinarily well.
Caesar later described a transformed political landscape in Gaul.
The Aedui remained the most important state.
But the Remi had risen dramatically.
Tribes that could not align themselves with the Aedui because of older rivalries began attaching themselves to the Remi instead.
Caesar says the Remi protected these dependents carefully and used those relationships to maintain their newly acquired authority.
The result was remarkable:
the Remi held second place in importance in Gaul.
Think about that trajectory.
They began Caesar’s Belgic campaign as one people among many.
Rather than attempt to defeat the most powerful military force entering their world, they studied the situation.
They chose an alliance.
They made themselves useful.
They protected their dependents.
They expanded their network.
And they converted a dangerous geopolitical moment into increased regional power.
This does not make every Remi decision admirable.
It makes their strategy worth studying.
America and Rome
This brings us back to the modern question.
When Americans say that the United States is becoming Rome, they are often talking about different Romes.
Some mean the late Republic.
Some mean the imperial system.
Some mean the western empire centuries later.
Those periods should not be casually mixed together.
But the late Republic does provide several recurring questions that remain relevant to any republic.
What happens when political opponents become enemies rather than competitors?
What happens when political violence becomes acceptable?
What happens when temporary rule-breaking becomes permanent precedent?
What happens when allegiance to individual leaders becomes stronger than allegiance to institutions?
What happens when citizens become so exhausted by political disorder that concentrated authority begins to look preferable to dysfunctional liberty?
Historian Edward Watts has emphasized precisely these aspects of the Roman republican crisis: escalating obstruction, political violence and the erosion of norms that had previously allowed political conflict to occur without destroying the system itself.
None of that proves America will share Rome’s fate.
It does mean Rome gives us questions worth asking.
Now Add the Remi
This series proposes an experiment.
Instead of looking only at Rome and asking:
How did a great power decline?
What happens if we place the Remi beside that question and ask:
How does a smaller society survive enormous political change without destroying itself?
The Remi had no modern Constitution.
No elections resembling ours.
No social media.
No industrial economy.
No modern nation-state.
They could not tell Americans how to structure healthcare policy or regulate artificial intelligence.
That would be absurd.
But peoples can display strategic habits.
And the historical Remi appear repeatedly associated with several.
Gather information before acting.
The Remi understood the political and military environment around them well enough to provide Caesar detailed intelligence.
Choose battles carefully.
They could fight, but their historical importance came from knowing when warfare served their interests and when it did not.
Preserve relationships.
Their power after Caesar depended partly on becoming a political center for other Gallic peoples.
Protect the people who attach themselves to you.
Caesar specifically says the Remi carefully protected dependent communities, helping preserve their newly acquired authority.
Adapt without immediately disappearing.
Roman rule transformed Remi society profoundly, but the political community and its regional identity survived.
Those aren’t policies.
They are strategic principles.
And principles are where the thought experiment becomes interesting.
The Question Is Not “Are We Rome?”
Maybe that is the wrong question.
Perhaps the better questions are:
What pressures destroyed political cooperation in Rome?
Which of those pressures can appear in other republics?
Which similarities are superficial?
Which are genuinely structural?
And when a society encounters enormous change, what behaviors increase its chances of adaptation rather than collapse?
That last question is where the Remi enter the conversation.
They encountered an expanding superpower.
They watched neighboring political orders collapse.
They lived through warfare, conquest and cultural transformation.
Yet they emerged from the initial conquest with greater political importance than before.
That outcome deserves examination.
A Historical Counterfactual
The articles in this series will therefore operate on three levels.
First:
What actually happened in Rome?
Second:
What do the surviving sources actually tell us about Remi behavior?
Third:
If we use those behaviors as a strategic lens, what might a hypothetical “Remi response” look like when applied to a modern problem?
The third category is speculation.
It will always be identified as such.
The purpose is not to pretend ancient people secretly understood twenty-first-century America.
The purpose is to use history to force ourselves to look at familiar problems differently.
The Series Ahead
We will examine questions such as:
When does political rivalry become tribal warfare?
What happens when information becomes subordinate to ideology?
How does a republic survive charismatic personalities?
What does military overextension actually look like?
Can prosperity itself be a national-security asset?
What happens when local institutions become weak?
How can a culture adapt without losing every part of its identity?
And perhaps most importantly:
How does a society know which battles are actually worth fighting?
Rome supplies one side of those questions.
The Remi supply another.
America supplies the reason we are asking them.