A senator of the early days of the Roman Republic, Cato the Elder, had a penchant for ending every speech he gave with a particular phrase and a call to action amidst the series of Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage during the second-century B.C. In the eyes of Cato, the Phoenician city-state of Carthage constituted an existential threat to the survival of the republic and had to be dealt with militarily in order to quell the danger it posed to Rome and its people. Failure to do so would spell the end of Rome and the fall of the republic.
Consequently, Cato consistently repeated his wish for the destruction of Carthage at the end of every speech he delivered regardless of its content. His undeterred passion and determination to ensure the evisceration of the threat brought by Carthage and the end of the humiliation they brought Rome in the Battle of Cannae made itself loud and clear at each oration given at the Roman Forum. Cato the Elder always ended his speeches with the words, “Carthago delenda est!” (Carthage must be destroyed!) as a reminder of what he strongly believed needed to be done to save his people.
His endearing and patriotic moral absolutism in determining Carthage’s necessary eradication for the safety and security of his people is nothing short of noble. He was able to identify an obstacle towards the fulfillment of Rome’s potential and, subsequently, focus intently on the removal of Carthage like a hawk. Indeed, it was only a few years after his death when Rome not only defeated the city-state at the Battle of Carthage, but also obliterated Carthage entirely from existence.
Oftentimes, modern-day calls for confrontation with other world powers brings to mind a similar violent sentiment to what Cato repeatedly espoused. At virtually every election cycle, we are inundated with warnings aimed to instill fear in us about our fellow world powers and the geopolitical landscape altogether. “The People’s Republic of China is going to take over!” “The Russian Federation needs to be controlled!” “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go!” At each turn, we’re left with the need to ask ourselves a few important questions: “What precisely are we going to do about it?”
The answers often given harken back to a misbegotten unilateralism that wrongly assumes that it is within our national interest to use our military force to instil compulsory change in the governments and leadership of other sovereign nations. We’ve been deluded in abandoning Westphalian principles of sovereignty in return for promises of liberating others from their undemocratic governments—promises that never end up materializing.
Instead of ardently focusing on the most serious threats to our republic like Cato the Elder did, we have fallen for the Siren’s song of nation-building abroad and overt military intervention in nations where we aren’t even welcome nor allowed to engage militarily under international law time and again.
It wasn’t too long ago when the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank located in our country’s capital, proclaimed that the U.S. military forces had “four core missions” which included two interesting central tenets: “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” and “perform the ‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions.” Sound familiar? The signatories of the PNAC’s September 2000 report included key members of the Bush II Administration’s members who fervently advocated for the Iraq War after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center just a year after the report’s publication. As a result, the prevailing militaristic ideology of PNAC had an enormous influence on not only the Bush Administration, but to several adherents to neoconservatism today.
The greatest threats of our time necessitate cooperation and multilateralism in the form of engagement through global institutions and diplomacy. Be it international terrorism, failing nation states, global warming, or the threat of nuclear proliferation, it is imperative that we focus on strengthening our bonds with the world not by imposing our will through force, but by establishing a brighter future through cooperative statesmanship and the use of force only as a last resort.
The advent of the twenty-first century has shown that the world cannot rely on America to solve all of its problems. Yet, at the same time, the problems of our world cannot be solved without America.
John Guarco is a Trinity senior. His column, “carthago delenda est.,” runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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