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There's a really strong "This is Their Super Bowl" effect in the historiography of barbarian invasions. In the same way that when a shitty team plays a rival who is having a good season, they show up and give their all, the barbarians get vastly excited about a victory, while the civilized shrug after defeating the barbarians. When the Chinese armies defeat a steppe confederacy that wasn't quite ready for prime time, it goes in the annals as "The emperor defeated a steppe army. Now about tax collection that year..." When the Mongols get a world-historic leader and win one, they never shut up about it for a thousand years.
Same pattern holds in Rome, where defeating barbarian armies was "mowing the grass" duty until the last years of the empire. Right up to today, where weirdoes will insist that American failures to impose their will in Vietnam or Iraq indicates the superior martial ability of third-worlders, when it mostly reflects an increased willingness to die for the cause of local independence.
I think so many of those weirdos don't even consider or realize to note that America's goal was not to wipe out Vietnam or Iraq.
Wiping out a nation is probably easier than trying to reform or subdue a nation. A major goal was trying to get those nations to become ideological aligned to America by bringing democracy and other western Ideas. If you're trying to get people to embrace democracy, you can't just kill everyone left and right.
I get the same feeling when people say there is no way American citizens can beat the US military in case of a civil war or insurrection. If the rebels are hiding in cities or rest of the population, you can't exactly bomb those cities indiscriminately. And there's the matter of public support, look at how much Israel gets criticized in their fight versus Hamas. You don't have to win in a straight up fight, you just need to hang on long enough until the fight becomes too expensive to be worth it or there is enough external pressure to stop the fighting..
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Great post. Also, almost every single country gets invaded ‘every few centuries’, including the US, it’s an absurd standard.
Depends on the definition of "few". Rome had an 800-year run from Brennus to the Fall. Constantinople similarly from the founding of the city as a purposes-built capital of the Eastern Roman Empire to the 4th crusade. On a strict definition of "invaded", England is at 950 and counting. In China, based on a quick wiki-check, all changes in dynasty from Jin to Song are due to Chinese domestic politics, not foreign invasion - about a 1000 year run.
Yes, but the fact that everyone knows these examples, and that such a core part of the British mythos is that it's been a thousand years since that invasion are kind of the point. Much of the rest of the world has been invaded rather more recently (a lot of it by Britain).
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