Can great powers master the art of survival?

John Glubb Pasha was a distinguished British officer. He participated in the wars of the British Empire during its last half-century in Europe and the Middle East, before being tasked with the leadership and establishment of the Arab Legion in the Emirate of Transjordan, which later became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Glubb, known to the Jordanian people as “Abu Hanik” due to a jaw injury he sustained in World War I, was keen to present himself as a professional soldier uninterested in the politics of the Empire or the region. However, he was more cunning than he appeared and participated astutely in reshaping the area. He was fully aware, like other military men of his generation, such as John (Abdullah) Philby and T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), that he operated on the edge between two civilizations: Arab and European. After the Arab nationalist awakening led his Jordanian army to prominence in 1956, he began to write many books about his memories in the region, the history of Islam, and the early Islamic empires, culminating in his major work, “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival.”

Glubb Pasha noted that all empires that have ruled the world over the past three thousand years share the same fate—a ceaseless cycle of rise and fall. He identified six stages of this cycle, starting with the existence of founding pioneers, followed by an era of conquests, which is succeeded by years of trade prosperity, leading to intellectual revival, and finally, decline. Through simple arithmetic, Glubb Pasha concluded that all empires typically last about two hundred fifty years, rarely exceeding that span. Despite the vast differences in technological, military, and economic power between the first military empire in history—the Assyrian Empire in the Near East—and the British Empire, which stretched from India to North America, both had nearly the same lifespan, with the Assyrians being luckier by seventeen years.

Glubb Pasha pinpointed the collapse of the British Empire to the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century. The collapse wasn’t immediately apparent; Britain had emerged victorious from World War I and subsequently seized more territory in the Middle East and Africa. However, the decline was inevitable and swift, as Glubb Pasha witnessed with the independence of India, Britain’s defeat in the Suez Crisis (known to us as the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt), and finally, the British government’s adoption of a withdrawal policy from East of Suez. Empires may not require an official declaration of death or a devastating invasion. In this respect, the English were luckier than the Assyrians, whose fall was loud and horrific due to the Babylonians and Medes entering their capital Nineveh and destroying it in 612 B.C. As for London, it still remains.

In truth, Glubb Pasha was not the first to analyze the cycles of rise and fall; many preceded him. Perhaps the earliest was Plato, in his depiction of cycles of governance, and Ibn Khaldun contributed significantly to the analysis of dynastic cycles. Likely, Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” published in volumes between 1776, the year of American independence, and 1789, the year of the French Revolution, was nothing more than a prediction of the British Empire’s fate that Gibbon sought to disguise as a comprehensive historical study. It is astonishing that this underlying anxiety within Western civilization about decline and disintegration accompanied the rise of Western powers and their dominance over the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the German philosopher and mathematician Oswald Spengler, in “The Decline of the West,” published between 1918 and 1923, saw the rise of empires merely as indicators of the collapse of civilizations, which he viewed as organic entities that carry within them the seeds of their illness.

It is noteworthy that these thinkers and others did not pay attention to the degree of technological or economic advancement of the empire as a measure of superiority or as a remedy for decline and disintegration; rather, they perceived a paradox between such progress and the onset of a downward curve. This ancient wisdom now appears as an uncomfortable truth for the priests of artificial intelligence and the evangelists of technical solutions, claiming to cure all issues and conquer space, building empires among the stars. Perhaps this current obsession with technology amid the various crises and conflicts our world faces, along with mixed signals of rise and fall, is a symptom of the materialism societies experience before embarking on a downward journey.

Thus, the answer to the initial question may be obvious: survival is impossible. Yet it is an art that can be mastered. The evidence is the only imperial power that has managed to survive longer than others before the modern era—the Byzantine Empire, which lasted a thousand years following the division of the Roman Empire in 285 A.D. When this division occurred, it was anticipated that the Western Roman Empire would be more fortunate due to its geopolitical position, having the Atlantic Ocean as its western boundary and no enemies to the south. Its only threat came from the Germanic tribes to the north, which quickly breached and destroyed it, declaring its end in 467 A.D.

The eastern part of the empire, however, was surrounded by dangers on all sides. To the east lay the Sassanian Empire, the traditional enemy of the Romans, while to the north, the empire faced successive attacks from the steppe peoples originating from Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Byzantium persisted as a strong political entity, even after losing its wealthier southern territories to the Arab conquests and the pressure from successive Islamic empires.

The Byzantines possessed an extraordinary ability to retreat and then rise again and expand. Consequently, the empire, regardless of the ruling dynasties, established a deep strategic culture composed of a mix of military might, diplomacy, and intelligence. The Byzantines developed an administrative and military apparatus capable of absorbing the strengths of their adversaries and integrating them into their inherited Roman military culture. Additionally, they mastered, due to their commercial position, the ability to transcend religious intolerance and transformed Constantinople into a multicultural and multireligious city. Unlike the Romans, who had the power to subjugate peoples, the Byzantines perfected the use of tools of power and understood the appropriate timing for utilizing each one individually or collectively.

There may be debate regarding the end of Byzantium—whether it was actually with the fall of Constantinople to the Franks and Venetians during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 or with its final fall to the Ottomans in 1453—but in both cases, it was the longest-lived and most adept at mastering the art of survival, considering the magnitude of threats it faced. Of course, it ultimately succumbed like others, due to a mix of population decline from the “Black Death” in the fourteenth century, internal power struggles, sectarian disputes, economic and military weakness, and the ongoing pressure from neighboring Turkish Islamic kingdoms that carved away its territories in Anatolia and the Aegean until only Constantinople remained, which ultimately became a “city-state.” Nevertheless, Muhammad the Conqueror’s armies faced significant resistance and determination in their attempt to seize it. The Conqueror recognized the cultural power represented by this thousand-year empire, viewed himself as its heir, and adopted the title “Caesar of Rome.”

Thus, the ability to adapt to changes is one of the keys to the survival of great powers or any other organic entity, as the law of evolution informs us. However, this often necessitates an elite that is aware of the movement of history and capable of developing this awareness into political and strategic tools. The paradox is that this awareness usually forms after it is too late, after the factors of decay and weakness have taken root. Nonetheless, historical laws are not ironclad; they also indicate humanity’s capacity to adapt and learn from mistakes, as well as to repeat them. Because history moves in a circular motion, there are always opportunities for resurgence, reconstruction, and re-establishing elements of strength.