THE FATE OF EMPIRES and SEARCH FOR SURVIVAL

(b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national greatness.

(g) The life histories of great states are amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.

(h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external causes.

(i) History should be taught as the history of the human race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the student’s own country.

Glubb wrote: "My plea is that history should be the history of the human race, not of one small country or period."

And yet, from the dreams of "empire" as centuries have shown, the dream lingers.

Here for comparison and contrast is:

"In brief, the U.S. policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change while evolving into the geopolitical core of shared responsibility for peaceful global management. A prolonged phase of gradually expanding cooperation with key Eurasian partners, both stimulated and arbitrated by America, can also help to foster the preconditions for an eventual upgrading of the existing and increasingly antiquated UN structures. A new distribution of responsibilities and privileges can then take into account the changed realities of global power, so drastically different from those of 1945.
"These efforts will have the added historical advantage of benefiting from the new web of global linkages that is growing exponentially outside the more traditional nation-state system. That web—woven by multinational corporations, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, with many of them transnational in character) and scientific communities and reinforced by the Internet—already creates an informal global system that is inherently congenial to more institutionalized and inclusive global cooperation.
"In the course of the next several decades, a functioning structure of global cooperation, based on geopolitical realities, could thus emerge and gradually assume the mantle of the world's current 'regent,' which has for the time being assumed the burden of responsibility for world stability and peace. Geostrategic success in that cause would represent a fitting legacy of America's role as the first, only, and last truly global superpower."
Source: THE GRAND CHESSBOARD - American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives CIA.gov

The internationalists' dream of various versions of some "world's regent" and regency as Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's advisor advisor, imagines came from a man born only decades after John Glubb. Like another, Henry Kissinger, the notion that some "we" manage some "grand chessboard" was and is historically naive. But the lure of "grand" power us a shared dream for many.

Thanks for posting the link to the Glubb paper, hosted by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

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