The most basic question about the political state of the world at any one time is, "Who's winning?" Which power is rising, which falling? Who's boss?
When Barack Obama became president of the United States, he argued that this was a crude way of thinking. Indeed, he won because voters were fed up with blundering "hyper-power". In his acceptance speech in Grant Park, Chicago, he said that the "true strength of our nation" came "not by the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals".
He was right about the power of American ideals, but he was mistaken, surely, to put money and arms on one side and ideals on the other. The history of imperium – of who wins the endless struggle for power – is that money and arms and ideals are all related. You run out of one, and you find it harder to sustain the others.
