“And what have they ever given us in return?”
“The aqueduct.”
“Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that.”
“And the sanitation. And the roads. Irrigation. Medicine. Education. The wine. Public baths. And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now.”
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health — what have the Romans ever done for us?”
“Brought peace.”
“Oh. Peace? Shut up!”
— Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979
It is one of the great comic set pieces of the twentieth century. Reg, the self-appointed revolutionary, tries to summon righteous anger against Rome, only to be undermined — point by point — by the banal persistence of facts. The aqueduct. The sanitation. The roads. The joke lands because the list is real, and because it is, in a deeper sense, irrelevant.
The defense of empire has always followed the same script. It builds, it organizes, it stabilizes — and in doing so, it produces tangible goods that outlast its rule. Rome had its roads. Britain had its railways. The United States has its global order, its institutions, its technologies. This is the standard case for hegemony: that whatever its excesses, it leaves the world more connected, more prosperous, more governable than it found it.
All of this is true. It is also insufficient.
The question is not whether empires produce benefits. They do. The question is why those benefits are produced, who they are designed to serve, and what price is paid — often by others, often invisibly — to sustain them. Infrastructure is not innocence. Order is not neutrality. And stability, when imposed, has a habit of resembling control.
Empires do not ask to be judged by their intentions. They are judged, eventually, by their consequences.
I. Rome: the aqueduct and the sword
Rome built roads to move legions, not tourists. The aqueducts served the cities that Rome needed productive and pacified. The law was designed to protect property — specifically Roman property. The Pax Romana was real: roughly two centuries of relative stability across a vast territory. But it was a peace enforced by the threat of annihilation, demonstrated repeatedly and without apology. Ask Carthage. Ask Jerusalem. Ask the Iceni.
What Rome left behind was not philanthropy. It was infrastructure in service of extraction, and institutions in service of control. That the infrastructure outlasted the empire — that the roads of Roman Britain shaped English geography for two thousand years, that Roman law is the bedrock of every European legal system — does not change the original intent. It merely reveals something important: that the tools of domination are often more durable than the domination itself.
II. Britain: the parliament and the famine
The British Empire added a layer of sophistication to this calculus. It wrapped extraction in the language of civilization. It built railways across India, and used them to efficiently move grain out of famine-stricken provinces. It exported parliamentary democracy — and simultaneously operated a system of racial hierarchy so rigid it would have embarrassed a Roman senator. It abolished the slave trade in 1807, having spent the preceding two centuries as its primary operator.
The British left behind borders drawn by colonial administrators with no regard for ethnic, linguistic, or cultural realities. They left the Balfour Declaration. They left Partition in India, in Ireland, in Palestine. They left legal systems, cricket, and the English language: genuinely useful inheritances, sitting atop a geological layer of deliberate ruin. The Monty Python scene is British satire, produced by Britons who knew precisely what they were doing. There is a reason Reg’s frustration collapses under the weight of the Romans’ achievements: the joke is also about the British Empire, and about every empire, and about the uncomfortable truth that the people who are occupied sometimes do benefit from certain aspects of the occupation — even as they are being robbed.
III. America: the exception that wasn’t
The United States arrived on the world stage with a different story to tell about itself. It was not an empire. It was a republic. It had fought a revolution against exactly the kind of imperial overreach that Rome and Britain represented. It would lead not through domination but through example, through the sheer magnetic force of its democratic ideals.
This story was always partly fictional, and the fiction has grown harder to sustain. Let us begin at the moment the American century announced itself with absolute clarity: August 6 and August 9, 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two cities vaporized in a flash, some 200,000 people killed, in what American officials presented as a regrettable military necessity. The debate over necessity has never fully resolved. What is beyond debate is that the bomb was dropped on civilian populations, that it inaugurated a nuclear age whose shadow has not lifted, and that it established the United States as the first and only nation to deploy atomic weapons in war. This was not a gift to humanity. It was a demonstration.
IV. The long list — and counting
What followed across eight decades is a catalogue that requires no embellishment.
Greece, 1947–1949: American intervention in the Civil War, backing the right against the left in what became a template for Cold War proxy conflict.
Italy, from 1948 onwards: systematic CIA funding of the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana) to prevent electoral victory by the Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). Operation Gladio: a stay-behind network linked to a strategy of tension — bombings, assassinations, manufactured chaos — designed to keep the left from power. The Bologna station massacre of 1980, eighty-five dead, carried out by neo-fascists with documented intelligence connections.
Iran, 1953: Operation Ajax dismantled the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, restored the Shah, and produced — with impeccable historical irony — the conditions for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. America spent twenty-five years securing Iranian oil; it got forty-five years of implacable enmity.
Guatemala, 1954: the CIA overthrew Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected reformist whose crime was threatening the land holdings of the United Fruit Company. The coup inaugurated decades of military rule and a civil war that killed 200,000 people, the vast majority of them indigenous Guatemalans.
Korea, 1950–1953: three million dead. The peninsula divided at the 38th parallel. The division holds to this day.
Congo, 1961: Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of independent Congo, was assassinated with CIA involvement. He had been in power for ten weeks.
Vietnam, 1965–1975: three million Vietnamese dead, perhaps more. Agent Orange — a chemical weapon whose effects persist across generations. The massacre at Mỹ Lai, where U.S. soldiers killed between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians. The secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which destabilized both countries and contributed directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
Bolivia, 1967: the CIA tracked Ernesto Guevara, provided intelligence to Bolivian forces, and a Bolivian sergeant executed him on American instruction. Che Guevara was many things, not all of them admirable. He was also a prisoner when he was shot.
Greece again, 1967: the CIA’s fingerprints on a military coup that brought seven years of dictatorship. The colonels were brutal and incompetent; the Americans found them useful.
Chile, 1973: Augusto Pinochet’s coup against Salvador Allende, a democratically elected socialist, was supported and partially engineered by the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger, who famously saw no reason why a country should be allowed to go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. Allende was killed on September 11, 1973, as troops stormed the presidential palace — whether by his own hand under siege or by those who put him there, the responsibility is not in doubt. Some three thousand Chileans were subsequently tortured, disappeared, or executed.
Cyprus, 1974: Henry Kissinger’s green light to Türkiye’s invasion, which divided the island in a way that remains frozen to this day. Convenience over principle, as usual.
Nicaragua, 1980s: when Congress cut off funding for the Contra rebels, the Reagan administration found another source of revenue — cocaine. The CIA facilitated drug trafficking into the United States to fund a covert war. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the conclusion of the Kerry Committee Report, a United States Senate investigation.
Iraq, 2003: an invasion launched on fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Approximately one million dead by the most comprehensive estimates. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. Extraordinary rendition. Torture as official policy, rebranded as “enhanced interrogation.” The destabilization that created the conditions for ISIS.
V. Even the gifts were weapons
Now let us revisit the helpful voice in the room, the one who kept interrupting Reg with inconvenient facts.
The Marshall Plan? Indisputably consequential for European reconstruction. Also indisputably a geopolitical instrument. George Kennan, its intellectual architect, was explicit: the plan was designed to prevent Western Europe from sliding toward communism. The generosity was real; so was the strategic calculation. Countries that received Marshall Plan funds were expected to align with American foreign policy. And they did. Greece and Türkiye received Marshall Plan aid in 1947; Greece had its coup twenty years later.
NASA? The greatest scientific achievement in human history landed twelve men on the Moon. It also began with Wernher von Braun, a former SS officer who used slave labor from concentration camps to build the V-2 rockets that killed thousands of British and Belgian civilians. Operation Paperclip brought him and dozens of other Nazi scientists to America, where their records were sanitized and their expertise deployed. The stars were reached on a foundation that included the bones of Mittelwerk’s prisoners. This is not a metaphor.
The internet? Born as ARPANET, a military communications network. GPS? Pentagon technology. Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem grew in the shadow of defense contracts. Even the open, democratic web that changed the world emerged from institutions designed to win wars — and it is now being re-militarized at speed.
Even the good things were instrumentalized. This does not make them less good. It makes them more honest.
VI. What an empire leaves behind
Rome left roads and law. Britain left borders and language. Both left trauma that is still being processed by the societies they passed through.
America is leaving something different. It is leaving failed states — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya — where the intervention produced chaos rather than order, and where the withdrawal produced more chaos still. It is leaving a nuclear proliferation problem it helped create by demonstrating, in 2003, that states without nuclear weapons get invaded and states with them, like North Korea, do not. It is leaving a global financial architecture fracturing under weaponized sanctions. It is leaving a Middle East in which its closest ally is engaged in a war whose conduct has alienated much of the world.
It is also leaving McDonald’s, Netflix, denim, and the English language as the global lingua franca. Cultural hegemony outlasts military hegemony; Rome’s is the proof. The world will speak in American idioms and watch American stories long after American aircraft carriers cease to be the final arbiters of regional disputes.
But here is what is different about the American imperial twilight: it is happening in real time, loudly, and with a remarkable lack of dignity. Rome declined over centuries. Britain managed its retreat with at least the performance of grace. America, in 2025–2026, is dismantling its own alliances, withdrawing from international institutions, and announcing its disengagement from the world order it constructed with all the subtlety of a man burning down his own house to spite his neighbors. The faces of this twilight are instructive. A president who has turned the humiliation of allies into a governing philosophy — who speaks of Greenland and the Panama Canal with the territorial appetite of a nineteenth-century imperialist, who greets autocrats warmly and treats democratic partners with open contempt — stands in full solidarity with a prime minister indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. They are not opposites. They are partners. One provides the diplomatic cover, the vetoes, the weapons. The other uses them. Together they jointly administer what they still call, with a straight face, a rules-based international order. This is the imperial endgame: not Caesar at the height of his powers, but a tawdry alliance between a reality-television demagogue and a man wanted by international justice. The rules, it turns out, were always for others.
The list is the trap
Reg’s question — what have the Romans ever done for us? — was never meant to be answered with a list. The list is the joke. The list is the trap. Because once it is accepted as the frame, the argument is already lost.
The aqueduct is real. So is the crucifixion. The Marshall Plan is real. So is the coup in Guatemala. The Moon landing is real. So is Mỹ Lai. History does not balance its books in moral equivalences; it accumulates outcomes. The existence of the former does not cancel the reality of the latter. It coexists with it.
The modern defense of American power is more sophisticated than Reg’s interlocutors, but it rests on the same foundation. It invokes the avoidance of great-power war, the containment of the Soviet Union, the reconstruction of Europe, the architecture of global trade. These are not trivial achievements. They are, in many cases, real. They are also the products of a system built to serve particular interests, enforced by particular means, and sustained at costs that were not evenly distributed.
The point is not that nothing was built. It is that what was built cannot be separated from how it was built. Or from what was broken in the process.
What the twilight of American hegemony reveals is not simply decline, but exposure. The language of a “rules-based order” rings differently when the rules are selectively applied. The promise of stability looks different when its guarantees become conditional. The distance between principle and practice, long managed, becomes impossible to ignore.
This is how empires end: not only when they weaken, but when the story they tell about themselves stops being believed — abroad, and eventually, at home.
The world that follows will not be innocent. It will not be fair. It will not, by default, be better. But it will be shaped, as all orders are, by power, and by the narratives that justify it.
Reg, in the end, concedes the aqueduct. He has to. But he refuses the conclusion that is supposed to follow from it. And he is right to refuse. Because the real question was never what empire gives. It is what it takes, and who gets to decide.
Apart from the roads, the institutions, the technologies, the order — apart from all the things that can be listed, itemized, and defended — what, in the end, have the Americans done for us?
Brought peace.