All about us: we don't really need to plunge into the arcana of imperial Rome to appreciate what America's doing wrong. But it's fun watching Cullen Murphy try.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: Book review

Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy Houghton Mifflin, 262 pp.

I totally understand where Cullen Murphy is coming from. As I was reading his new book, which tries to tell us what the United States can learn from ancient Rome, I kept experiencing flashbacks. If, like me, you've had the good fortune to spend the past few years traveling around the world to report on U.S. foreign policy, then you've probably had plenty of cause to ruminate about the sources and limits of empire. You might have sampled the prime rib and the chocolate shakes at Camp Bondsteel, a comfortable town conjured up out of nothing on top of a muddy hill in Kosovo, courtesy of U.S. Army engineers, or watched a small fleet of U.S. Marines nonchalantly steam up to the Black Sea coast of Ukraine on maneuvers, dazzling the locals with the exercise machines and spotless toilets on board their ships. You might have stood above the flight line on Guam and looked down at the typhoon-proof hangars for stealth bombers and the parking spaces for dozens of B52s, or listened to Japanese officials complain about the stress of negotiating status-of-forces agreements with those long-nosed barbarians from Washington. You might have purchased souvenirs in the PX on the U.S. Air Force base in Kyrgyzstan, or lost your way at night among the Bradleys and the Abrams taking up a kilometer-square parking lot in one of our immense bases in occupied Iraq. It's easy to be shocked and awed by these manifestations of America's global reach. On the other hand, if you've read your Tacitus, as Cullen Murphy has, you might conclude that there's nothing new under the sun.

Let's just get one thing out of the way up front: This book is a lot of fun to read, especially if you're a hopeless geek who likes his post-9/11 geopolitics served up with a heavy dose of ancient arcana. I plead guilty. I particularly enjoyed the part where Murphy (who made his career as an editor at the Atlantic Monthly and has just jumped over to Vanity Fair) compares Roman and American brilliance in logistics--a subject scandalously neglected by the contemporary chattering classes (Discovery Channel excepted, of course). Murphy unashamedly sings the praises--a panegyric, if you will allow me to get classical for a moment--of a gloriously obscure organization known as the Defense Logistics Agency:

If it were a private corporation, the Defense Logistics Agency, which buys and tracks all of the...