Thousands of years ago, Ecclesiastes reminded us that human nature being what it is, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Or as George Santayana said more pithily, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I mention this because a new analysis of Rome’s fall says that the West and, very specifically, America, are making the same mistakes that doomed the Roman Empire: They’re allowing a geopolitical enemy to take over trade and, by weakening their militaries, giving Islam room to fill the resulting power vacuum.

Here’s the summary from the Daily Mail:

They discovered that the Romans miscalculated their Persian opponents which caused their downward spiral, leaving them weak and allowing Islam to rise in a manner that essentially wiped out the once-powerful civilization.

The two groups were at war from 54 BC to 628 for control of territories, but the Persians and Sassanians took over Roman trade routes that were critical to their victory.

Without access to trade, the economy quickly collapsed and forced people in the Roman Empire to flee to other regions like Constantinople, the researchers said.

By examining the many shipwrecks throughout the Mediterranean, the researchers noted a collapse in Roman trade by the second half of the 7th century, something that was not predictable if one looked back only 100 years. In other words, there wasn’t a continuous decline in prosperity that was capped by a mini-Ice Age and mid-6th century plague. Instead, there was an abrupt collapse:

The information ‘led us to conclude that the eastern Roman Empire started to decline ... after a [disruption in trade] and military failures,’ authors Lev Cosijns from the University of Oxford and Haggai Olshanetsky told DailyMail.com.

[snip]

Dr Olshanetsky and Dr Cosijns said during the 2nd century AD, the number of Roman shipwrecks stayed consistent with between 200 and 300 occurring every 50 years.

But that number drastically dropped to 100 by 551 AD and dropped to just 67 by the second half of the 7th century, signifying that their trade routes were cut off.

The Roman and Persian Empires fought to control territories to expand their influence throughout Armenia, Mesopotamia and northern Syria.

These territories were strategically important because they offered more border protection and access to vital trade routes.

The Roman Empire won the war under the leadership of Emperor Heraclius who launched a counterattack deep into Persian territory, catching the army off guard and forcing them into a decisive battle near the ruins of Nineveh.

But the disrupted trade route slowly weakened the Roman Empire, leading to their demise.

Naturally, the academics behind the project insist that their research really works to silence climate deniers. Thus, they say, they’ve just proven that the mini-Ice Age of the 6th century wasn’t behind Rome’s collapse and, therefore, climate deniers are just wrong. And yes, their argument is that stupid:

‘We think that looking for climate change and plague as the cause for every significant change in history is problematic,’ Dr Olshanetsky and Dr Cosijns said.

‘This approach can especially harm the current climate change debate when claiming that past climate change caused catastrophic disruptions in society, in cases when there were none or limited effects,’ they continued.

‘Such claims may inadvertently support arguments that state since climate change has always occurred, the current man-made one is not a serious issue.’

But setting aside the researchers’ obsessive climate idiocy, they’ve actually proven something much more concerning, which is that Democrat trade, military, and pro-Islam policies are pushing us toward the same catastrophe that brought down the Roman Empire.

Think about it: The researchers say that Rome ceded important trade routes to the Persians. We’ve given our trade over to China. Heck, we’ve subsidized it for decades. Trump briefly stopped this trend during his four years, only to have the Democrats reinstate Chinese trade dominance the moment they regained power.

The researchers say that Rome suffered serious military failures during that pivotal time. We have, too. Thanks to the Democrats, we gave up victories in Vietnam and Iraq while abandoning the fight in Afghanistan. In the latter two countries, radical Islam filled the resulting vacuum. Moreover, since 2008, Democrats have been busy turning the U.S. military into a social justice experiment, focused on fighting climate change, not national enemies, while obsessing about race and gender rather than merit and military ability.

Lastly, the researchers say that ascendant Islam filled the gap the Roman Empire left. Today, Islam is again ascendant, and Democrats have been doing their best to placate it and, in many cases, to advance it. Obama’s love for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mullahs are part of the left’s war—and, perhaps, Obama’s personal war—against the West. We see the same trend in Biden’s slow-walking aid to Israel, which is on the front lines against radical Islam.  

If we remember the past, we can avoid George Santayana’s grim warning. After all, Rome was able to recover from the early 5th-century sacking that seemed to spell its doom. However, the facts tell us that we are in the process of repeating Rome’s final fall. Trump has two years—until the next mid-term—to break free of that terrible historical destiny.

UPDATE: I received a friendly email from Haggai Olshanetsky suggesting that it was better to read the original press release, rather than to rely on the Daily Mail report about that press release. It turns out that, while the Daily Mail sent the climate change issue to the bottom of the essay, the essay’s whole purpose was to say that it wasn’t climate change or plague that ended the Roman Empire. Thus, the title is “New Research Shows that Climate and Plague Did Not Bring About the Collapse of the Roman Empire.”

To that end, Lev Cosijns and Dr. Olshanetsky discovered shipping data demonstrating that despite temperature drops and the famed plague of Justinian (541-549), that was not when Rome’s decline began. Instead, “there was an increase in prosperity and demography in the second half of the 6th century CE.”

Very specifically to the point I made, about what drove down the Roman Empire, Dr. Olshanetsky said,

It seems the Roman Empire entered the 7th century at the peak of their power, population and economic output. However, Roman miscalculations, and their failure against their Persian-Sassanian opponents, brought the entire area into a downward spiral, thereby leaving the two empires weak and allowing Islam to rise.

And then, and I’ll quote exactly, these two historians, write that today’s climate change is worse than anything that’s ever occurred before:

“Our greatest mistake today is that some current historical research tries to blame climate change for every crisis or change in history,” says Lev Cosijns, “The problem is that this can create situations where people who wish to minimise or disregard the current manmade climate change use the excuse that climate change always occurred, with occasional terrible effects, so nothing is out of the ordinary.”

“But the difference is that most changes and disasters since humans learned how to write may not have been connected to climate,” adds Haggai Olshanetsky, “and in these last 5000 years, humans never faced climate change as severe and drastic as the present one. This current climate change is the first manmade one, it is beyond the natural scale, and must be addressed.”

I’ll add only that Drs. Cosijns and Olshanetsky might also want to check out (a) the Washington Post’s admission that temperature changes have not been a steady march to a wild warming trend in the last few decades and (b) John Kelly’s fascinating The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. Kelly meticulously documents the Black Death’s march through the world, from its first appearance in China to its final days, after it wiped out 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe’s population. Two things stand out about the book. He makes a strong case that the plague resulted from non-anthropogenic climate change in the form of global cooling.

As the world warmed in the early Middle Ages, people planted more crops, had more food, and, therefore, thrived, leading to a population explosion. The same warm weather allowed for trade routes to go further north, entering territory where plague was endemic among rodents. However, the Little Ice Age, which began at the end of the 13th century, severely reduced crops. This, in turn, led to famine, which weakened people and made them more vulnerable to the plague. 

Image of the Sack of Rome by Karl Bryullov. Public domain.