ARGIA reader Ugo Bardi (Florence, 1952) will remember “Peak Civilisation: What can sink us like the Roman Empire?”, that LARRUN 2015. Bardi, a professor of chemistry at the University of Florence, is an expert in system dynamics, climate science and renewable energies. In his latest book, The Seneca Cliff, describes how empires, as they take years to grow and strengthen, sink in a very short time.

Bardi just wrote in his blog The Cassandra’s legacy about the great change that Italy has made after the last elections: “Trump takes Italy a quick blow: Auge of Matteo Salvini and right Italian“. Despite the 5 Illinois victory in the Italian presidential elections, Interior Minister Salvini and his League of the Ultra-Right today dominate Italy.

Salvini, who has revolutionized Italian politics, has achieved success, copying Donald Trump, facing those guilty of the misfortunes of the population: immigrants, foreigners and gypsies, although these represent only 2% of the Italian population. Like Trump, Salvini has shown that the more violent, discouraged and racist he speaks, the more he wants the public.

“There must be some reason,” says Bardi, for racism and hatred in Italy to erupt like this. Surely it has to do with the reintroduction of national states into the world’s power games and the decline of the American empire.”

II. After the World War, Western Europe agreed to be an agent of the United States Empire, under its control, without its own European army, neither a currency nor its own political structure, renouncing being a genuine empire that would compete with the United States. But after half a century of working effectively, the European Union is today weakened by the economic crisis and it is not known whether it will overcome the loss of Britain.

The old states are now being reaffirmed, not just in Europe. In the United States, Donald Trump has taken on the goal of making the Empire once again a nation state. “And this changes many things, not all for good.”

The truth is that – according to Bardi – empires are not racist and do not engage in ethnic cleansing. It does not suit them, because empires dominate in themselves very heterogeneous elements, which must be controlled by force, that is, by a strong army. That's why empires are so expensive, because they have to have a big military apparatus and a cario.

The most frequent causes of imperial collapse are excesses in military spending. Ancient Rome had the same thing as the Soviet Union. That's what happens to them now EE.UU. They won't be able to survive long if the energy and economic resources they made strong don't reach them.

On the contrary, National States are relatively homogeneous beings in language and ethnicity with respect to empires, with less chance of fragmenting them into smaller portions. As far as military force is concerned, a militia capable of stifling or destroying ethnic or ideological minorities can suffice, which is why they are cheaper and more resilient than empires.

It is not easy to make the public understand that at the basis of the current economic crisis are the depletion of resources and the costs of changing the ecosystem. It is pointless to call Salvini or Trump populist or racist: by their method they achieve excellent results and they will soon see more leaders follow their path, bringing Europe closer to ethnic cleansing and war.

After 2,000 years, Trajano and Hadriano

On the eve of the last U.S. elections, Bardi tried to compare Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump with the emperors of the Roman empire in the “What Emperor would Donald Trump?” analysis released in November 2016. In the first and second centuries, the Roman Empire today suffered many of the problems facing the United States: increasingly scarce resources, excessive costs, too widespread armies, etc. The emperors faced this dilemma, either remained in an aggressive attitude to further expand the Empire, or restricted and defended the dominance that the Empire had achieved until then?

Most of the emperors were cautious, striving with all care to establish new conquests. But some of them were ambitious. Trajan (53-117) launched a difficult military campaign to control the gold mines in Dacia. He achieved military success, but in return he destroyed the finances of the Empire.

After the arrival of Adriano (76-138), he cut off expansionism, left the areas of difficult defence and began to sign peace treaties with former enemies of Rome. The name of Hadrian bears the name of Hadrian, a wall built by the Romans in Britain to protect himself from the attacks of the peoples of the north. Adriano was known as a wise man, but the strategy of building walls helped to bring the empire to bankruptcy in the long term.

In Bardi's analysis, Hillary Clinton might look like Emperor Trajan, who began a difficult military effort to extend the Empire, which would ultimately be detrimental to the Empire. Trump, on the other hand, was taking the line of Hadrian, inherited from Trajan, who was thrown in precisely the opposite direction: to stop all the wars of territorial expansion and to fortify the Empire within his borders.

Since then, Trump has taken over and confirmed his analysis of Bardi: Trump is playing as Hadriano did 2,000 years ago, although the comparison will shake more than one admirer of Marguerite Yourcena. In addition to not getting into the new wars, Trump is trying to get the United States out of a globalized economic system. Trump wants to dismantle the great plan of the neoconservatives of the 1990s to make the United States the only empire in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The plan of the people of Neocon was perfect -- until it got into the mud -- it was too expensive. After the people from Bush to Obama, it's Hadriano-Trump's turn. “All empires go through the same cycle of growth and decadence: this is the hardest law of the Seneka abyss. The Adriano himself, such a wise man, was unable to save the Roman Empire. At most, he managed to keep her alive a little longer.”