In 196 BC, during the Isthmian Games near Corinth, one of the great festivals at which the Greek world gathered, a Roman herald stepped forward before an enormous crowd and made an extraordinary announcement. The previous year Rome had defeated Philip V of Macedon at Cynoscephalae. Macedon, which for generations had been the dominant military power in Greece, had been humbled. Now the Roman commander Titus Quinctius Flamininus announced that the Greeks were free.
Plutarch preserves the words of the proclamation. The Greeks were to be free, ungarrisoned, exempt from tribute, and governed according to their ancestral laws.[1] He also tells us that the cheering was so deafening that birds flying over the stadium fell from the sky. Perhaps a literary embellishment, but the enthusiasm was real. Rome had not annexed Greece; its troops would soon withdraw. It had defeated the power that had dominated mainland Greece and proclaimed the restoration of Greek freedom.
Twenty years had passed. It was 176 BC. The Greek cities still had their assemblies, laws and magistrates; the Achaean League continued to meet; the once-powerful Aetolian League still existed, though greatly diminished; Athens remained a self-governing city of immense cultural prestige; Rhodes remained a sovereign republic; Macedon was still an independent kingdom. There was no Roman governor of Greece. Yet something fundamental had changed. Every Greek statesman of consequence now had to ask a question that would scarcely have occurred to his grandfather: how would Rome react? That question, more than any constitutional change, captures the transformation that had taken place since Flamininus proclaimed Greek freedom.
Our story is not only about Greece in 176 BC. It is also about Europe in 2026 and about the international order in which Europe now operates. Ancient Greece offers a particularly revealing comparison because it allows us to observe what happens when formally sovereign states live inside an order whose ultimate security and balance of power depend on somebody else. The parallel is not a claim that history repeats itself. The chronology is not exact, nor are the actors identical. It is a way of asking what the past can tell us about a present system that may itself be entering a period of profound change.
Hegemony rarely arrives all at once. It develops through a sequence of choices, precedents and accommodations. A great power that initially intervenes as a liberator becomes the arbiter to whom smaller states increasingly turn; military predominance creates political influence, political influence opens economic opportunities, and local elites learn to operate within the new distribution of power. Formal sovereignty may survive throughout much of this process. The story of Rome and the Greeks allows us to watch it unfold almost step by step. It also allows us to ask how far the comparison extends to Europe within the American order today.
There is a further question. Rome in 176 BC was a rising power, while the United States in 2026 may be facing a very different trajectory. If the international order is now changing again, what happens to Europe when the hegemonic power on which its security has depended for eighty years is itself increasingly challenged?
The Second Macedonian War is where the story begins. At Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, the Roman legions defeated Philip V’s Macedonian army. Philip made peace, and the following year came the spectacular proclamation at Corinth. More important still, Rome subsequently withdrew its troops. That withdrawal matters because Rome could have occupied Greece but chose not to. Instead, it attempted to construct a Greek order capable largely of governing itself, but embedded within a strategic system made possible by Roman power.
The settlement was soon tested. The Aetolians, important allies of Rome against Philip but increasingly dissatisfied with the new order, turned to another great power. In 192 BC they invited Antiochus III into Greece. Antiochus ruled the immense Seleucid kingdom, the great eastern power of the age, stretching from Asia Minor and Syria through Mesopotamia and Iran toward Central Asia. He presented his intervention as a defense of Greek freedom against Rome.
The Greek response was divided. The Aetolians supported Antiochus, but the Achaean League sided with Rome, as did Philip V of Macedon. Rome defeated Antiochus at Thermopylae in 191 BC, forced him out of Greece and carried the war across the Aegean. At Magnesia the following year, a Roman army decisively defeated the Seleucid king in Asia Minor. The subsequent settlement forced Antiochus out of most of Asia Minor, pushing Seleucid power back beyond the Taurus Mountains in southern Anatolia. Much of the territory passed instead to Rome’s allies, particularly Pergamum and Rhodes. Roman influence now extended far beyond Greece, deep into the political order of Asia Minor. The Aetolians, who had invited Antiochus into Greece, were themselves defeated and subjected in 189 BC to a restrictive settlement that sharply reduced their independence.
This sequence illustrates what the great nineteenth-century historian Theodor Mommsen understood about Rome’s conquest of the Greek East: it was a cumulative process rather than the execution of a premeditated imperial blueprint. Interventions generated obligations; obligations generated further interventions; victories created new security problems; supremacy gradually became direct rule.[2] We need not imagine the Roman Senate sitting down in 196 BC and secretly planning the destruction of Corinth fifty years later. Hegemonic systems can develop incrementally.
Liberation produces gratitude and alignment; alignment creates dependence upon the greater power’s protection; dependence gives that power increasing influence over disputes among its allies. Gradually, its preferences become part of every domestic political actor’s calculations, while alternatives that once appeared perfectly legitimate begin to seem irresponsible, dangerous or simply unrealistic. All this can happen while every state involved remains formally sovereign. In Greece, it was already happening within a generation of Flamininus’ proclamation.
Our best guide to this transformation is Polybius of Megalopolis, born around 200 BC: an Achaean aristocrat and politician who would become one of antiquity’s greatest historians. Polybius belonged to a political tradition that favored cooperation with Rome but resisted the idea that friendship with Rome meant unconditional submission. His life would eventually carry him from the councils of the Achaean League into the innermost circles of the Roman aristocracy, and finally back to a defeated Greece.
In 180 BC, the Achaean League sent an embassy to Rome that included Callicrates, an Achaean politician who would become the leading advocate within the League of accommodation to Roman wishes. Before the Senate, Callicrates offered the Romans remarkably candid advice. Greek politics, he explained, was increasingly divided between those who believed Rome’s wishes should prevail even when they conflicted with local laws and agreements, and those who maintained that friendship with Rome remained bounded by laws and treaties.
If Rome wanted the first group to prevail, Callicrates suggested, it needed to alter the political incentives. Polybius summarizes the lesson with striking clarity: those who supported Rome’s decisions should be strengthened; those who opposed them should be weakened.[3]
It is one of the most revealing passages in Polybius. Rome was discovering that it did not need Roman officials sitting in every Greek council, because it could exercise influence through Greek politics itself. Callicrates need not have thought of himself as a traitor. He may sincerely have believed that Rome was too powerful to challenge, that confrontation would have disastrous consequences, and that the sensible policy for Achaia was therefore to anticipate Roman wishes and retain Roman favor. That is precisely what makes him more interesting than the caricature of a foreign power’s puppet.
A durable hegemonic system does not normally depend upon politicians who secretly hate their own countries. It works better when influential members of local elites genuinely conclude that their country’s prosperity and security, and often their own political careers, depend upon maintaining a close relationship with the hegemon. Empire thus begins to operate inside the political calculations of the subordinate state itself, without any need for a governor sitting above it.
Macedon, now ruled by Perseus, son of Philip V, remained an important power. When war broke out between Rome and Macedon in 171 BC, the Greek states faced choices that exposed the complexities of the new order. The Achaean League did not side with Perseus: it supplied troops to Rome, and in 169 BC voted to offer the Romans its full military levy, an offer carried to the Roman consul by Polybius and other envoys and ultimately declined. Yet the League remained divided over how far alignment should go. Polybius’ father Lycortas favored neutrality; Polybius and the general Archon concluded that cooperation with Rome was the safer course, while still resisting the idea that alliance required unconditional deference.
The war ended at Pydna on 22 June 168 BC. The tactically superior Roman legions crushed Perseus’ army, destroying the last power in the Greek world capable of balancing Rome. The victory therefore did more than settle a war. It changed the political meaning of the choices the Achaeans had been debating: cooperation, neutrality and resistance looked very different once the Macedonian counterweight had disappeared. From that moment, Greek politics operated in a fundamentally unipolar world.
The settlement of 167 BC showed what this meant. Rome did not annex Macedonia but instead abolished the monarchy and divided the country into four separate republics, restricting relations among them. Livy explains the reasoning: Rome feared that if Macedonia retained a common political council, some future leader might reunify the country and recreate the threat that Rome had just destroyed. Macedonia could therefore be free, but its institutions had to be designed so that freedom could no longer translate into independent strategic power.
Livy uses a remarkable phrase: libertatem salubri moderatione datam, freedom granted “in healthy moderation.”[4] The choice of words is revealing: liberty is treated almost as something beneficial in the right measure, but dangerous in excess. The Macedonians no longer had a king, but neither did they receive a Roman governor. They continued to administer much of their own affairs, while Rome had removed their capacity to act again as a unified regional power.
After Pydna, Rome’s reckoning extended beyond the states that had actually supported Perseus. The Achaean League had fought on Rome’s side, yet Roman commissioners now demanded that those accused of insufficient loyalty answer for their conduct. Callicrates and other pro-Roman leaders helped identify their domestic opponents; roughly one thousand leading Achaeans were sent to Italy in 167 BC, and Polybius was among them. His presence on the list is particularly revealing: only two years earlier he had carried the League’s offer of full military support to the Roman consul. Unlike most of the other detainees, he was allowed to remain in Rome, where he entered the circle of Aemilius Paullus and became a close friend of Paullus’ son, Scipio Aemilianus.
The settlement of 167 BC also had an economic dimension. The Macedonians were required to pay Rome half the tribute they had previously paid their kings. It was an extraordinarily advantageous arrangement for the victor: Macedonia continued to bear much of the cost of governing itself, ceased to threaten the regional order, and transferred to Rome part of the revenue that had previously sustained its monarchy. Indirect rule could therefore deliver many of the strategic and fiscal benefits of empire without all the administrative costs.
Rome also determined what Macedonia could do with some of its most valuable resources. The gold and silver mines, important sources of royal revenue, were closed; iron and copper mining could continue, subject to a levy at half the former royal rate. The Macedonians were prohibited from cutting timber for shipbuilding, while Rome also imposed rules on the trade in salt, an essential commodity in the ancient economy. Rome was therefore willing, at least initially, to forgo the revenue that could have been extracted from Macedonian gold and silver rather than leave that source of fiscal capacity at the unrestricted disposal of the new republics. Macedonia was free, but Rome determined which important resources could be exploited and on what terms. The economics of “freedom in healthy moderation” were as carefully calibrated as the politics.[4]
Another instance of how political power could reshape economic relations without armies or annexation is Rome’s treatment of Rhodes. The island was one of the great commercial and maritime powers of the Hellenistic Mediterranean, its prosperity built on trade, shipping and the revenues of its harbor. During the war with Perseus it had attempted to mediate, a policy Rome judged insufficiently loyal. The Senate did not invade the island. In 167/166 BC, it instead declared Delos a free port and transferred the island to Athenian control.
The consequences for Rhodes were devastating. Polybius later records the Rhodians complaining that their annual harbor revenues had fallen from around one million drachmas to roughly 150,000.[5] No legion had sacked Rhodes: Rome had simply used its political supremacy to change the commercial rules of the eastern Mediterranean, and trade shifted accordingly.
Delos prospered spectacularly, while Roman and Italian merchants and businessmen became increasingly visible there and throughout the Greek East. Political power was altering economic geography, and the new economic geography in turn created groups with a material interest in preserving Roman political power.
Over the following century, the connection between Roman power and private economic interests became much deeper. Pergamum, a wealthy Greek kingdom in western Asia Minor, passed to Rome when its last king, Attalus III, bequeathed it to the Roman people in 133 BC. Rome thereby acquired one of the richest territories in the eastern Mediterranean. Roman publicani, private contractors involved in tax collection and other public functions, became deeply involved in the new province of Asia, while Roman and Italian bankers, financiers and businessmen spread through the cities of the East.
By Cicero’s time, the relationship between Roman political supremacy and private Roman economic interests was explicit. In the Pro lege Manilia of 66 BC, Cicero argued that instability in Asia threatened not merely Rome’s tax revenues but the fortunes of Roman businessmen and investors operating there.[6] Hegemony had created powerful economic interests with a stake in its preservation.
Indirect control remained attractive only while it worked. Macedonia provides the clearest example. In 149 BC, an adventurer named Andriscus, claiming to be a son of Perseus, overturned the settlement of 167 and succeeded for a time in reunifying Macedonia. Rome had to send another army. Andriscus was defeated in 148 BC, and Macedonia then passed into a much more direct and permanent Roman administrative regime, developing into a regular province.
Greece followed a different and more complicated path. In 146 BC, escalating tensions between Rome and the Achaean League ended in war. The military imbalance was enormous. Diaeus of Megalopolis, the last Achaean commander, attempted a desperate defense, but the Roman consul Lucius Mummius defeated the Achaean army near Corinth and entered one of the richest and most celebrated cities of the Greek world. Corinth was destroyed, its treasures were carried away, the Achaean League was dissolved, and Roman commissioners reorganized the defeated Greek states. In the same year, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Rome destroyed Carthage. Few dates better symbolize the emergence of Roman Mediterranean supremacy.
Rome did not simply turn Greece into a conventional province in 146 BC. Greece had passed decisively under Roman authority, but its cities retained substantial local self-government under differing arrangements, while Roman authority was generally exercised from Macedonia. Its precise administrative status remains debated, partly because the Republican provincia was not yet a neatly bounded territorial unit. Only under Augustus, in 27 BC, did Achaia become a separate senatorial province.[7]
The distinction matters because hegemony, subjection and provincialization were not the same thing. Rome could move from one to another gradually and pragmatically. Macedonia’s controlled independence failed and was replaced by more direct rule; Achaia was crushed and subjected in 146 but took a different institutional route before acquiring its final provincial form.
This is better understood as adaptation than as the execution of a master plan. Direct rule imposed administrative costs; indirect rule imposed political and security risks. Rome repeatedly adjusted the balance as circumstances changed. Empire was, among other things, a search for the least costly institutional arrangement capable of delivering security, compliance and revenue.
Nor should the destruction of Corinth tempt us to reinterpret everything that preceded it as a fiction. The freedom proclaimed in 196 BC had been real in important respects: Rome genuinely withdrew its troops, Greek cities retained substantial internal autonomy for decades, and many Greeks prospered. What changed was the environment in which that freedom could be exercised, and eventually Rome’s judgment about how much indirect control was sufficient.
Polybius, meanwhile, had spent much of the intervening period inside Rome’s ruling class. He travelled with Romans, observed their institutions and came to admire many features of their political system. He accompanied Scipio and was present during the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. Yet he never ceased to be Greek. He remained the historian who preserved for us the unflattering story of Callicrates and understood what Roman predominance was doing to Greek politics.
After the catastrophe in Achaia that same year, Polybius returned to Greece and used his standing with the Romans to help his compatriots navigate the settlement imposed by the victors. Whether we call him a collaborator, a realist or a patriot using his Roman connections to save what could still be saved, none of these categories quite captures his position.
That ambiguity was not an accidental feature of Roman rule. It became one of its greatest strengths. Access to Rome acquired political value; friendship with influential Romans mattered; Roman support could strengthen local politicians against domestic opponents. Eventually the process went much further. Roman citizenship itself became a formidable instrument of integration, and local elites across the Mediterranean gradually became Roman elites. They did not merely obey the empire; they joined it.
This capacity to turn subordination into participation is central to the work of Giovanni Brizzi, one of the leading contemporary historians of Rome. Brizzi emphasizes fides - trust, obligation and protection within an unequal relationship - as one of the bonds tying weaker communities to Rome. Over time, such relationships could be reinforced by incorporation: local elites entered Roman networks, acquired citizenship and eventually joined Rome’s ruling class. Conquest could thus turn former outsiders into participants in Roman power.[8]
The Greek world is perhaps the greatest example. Political absorption did not entail cultural annihilation. Greek cities remained centers of wealth, education and intellectual life; Greek aristocrats became Roman citizens and eventually Roman senators, while Greek language, philosophy, literature and art penetrated the Roman elite so profoundly that they became integral to Roman imperial civilization itself. An empire does not have to be experienced simply as oppression; sometimes its durability derives precisely from the fact that it is not.
Integration created losers as well as winners. By the early first century BC, Roman political predominance in the East had become associated in many communities with tax collectors, creditors, financiers, merchants and resident Italian businessmen. The networks that had made Roman power economically profitable also made it visible in everyday economic life.
In 88 BC, Mithridates VI Eupator, the formidable king of Pontus, recognized the widespread resentment generated by Roman political and economic predominance and harnessed it to present himself as a liberator while ultimately pursuing a hegemony of his own. He ordered the coordinated killing of Romans and Italians across the cities of Asia Minor. Appian gives the famous figure of 80,000 victims, a number that should be treated cautiously, but the geographical scale of the operation and the willingness of local communities to participate are harder to dismiss.[9]
The symmetry is striking: in 196 BC, Rome had entered the Greek world proclaiming liberation; in 88 BC, Mithridates could mobilize support by proclaiming liberation from Rome. Political hegemony had generated economic hegemony, and economic hegemony had created beneficiaries, relationships of dependence and resentments. For a time, Mithridates succeeded in turning those resentments into a geopolitical challenge to Roman rule.
Ultimately, he failed. His defeat did not dismantle the Roman system; it helped produce still deeper Roman involvement in the East. A failed backlash against a hegemonic order can strengthen the hegemon rather than weaken it.
The Roman experience points to a broader question: what does sovereignty mean within a security order that ultimately rests on the power of another state? For Western Europe, that question has been shaped by the settlement that emerged after 1945. American military power became the central pillar of European security, and NATO its principal institutional expression. European states remained fully sovereign, but the security architecture in which they operated continued to rest above all on the United States.
A realist such as John Mearsheimer offers one way of understanding the strategic implications of this arrangement. In a world structured by competition among great powers, alliances can be instruments through which a dominant power organizes the strategic space around it.[10] Consider a simple thought experiment: could Italy decide tomorrow that its security interests would be better served by leaving the American strategic system and entering a military alliance with China? Could Germany conclude a military alliance with Russia while remaining embedded in Europe’s existing security architecture? Legally these are sovereign states, but strategically such choices are inconceivable.
That is the distinction between formal sovereignty and strategic freedom, and the Greeks of the second century BC would have understood it immediately. Athens could pass laws, Achaia could convene assemblies and Rhodes could send ambassadors, but choices that touched the foundations of Roman power were no longer theirs alone to make.
The economic architecture of the postwar order reinforced this strategic hierarchy. The Marshall Plan genuinely helped rebuild Western Europe, but reconstruction, Cold War strategy and American economic interests were never mutually exclusive objectives. The US State Department’s own historical account notes that the program stimulated the American economy by creating markets for American goods, while European recovery helped ensure that Western Europe remained a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union, America’s rival superpower.[11]
The same European reconstruction that brought prosperity and security to Europeans helped sustain American prosperity and anchored Western Europe more firmly within a US-centred economic system. There is no contradiction in this. Roman protection could benefit the Greeks while benefiting Rome; American protection and reconstruction could benefit Europeans enormously while simultaneously strengthening the United States. Hegemonic orders often endure precisely because they generate genuine benefits for subordinate states even while distributing power unequally.
Over time, the advantages of that system became much larger than investment and trade alone. The dollar emerged as the world’s principal reserve and financing currency, while US financial markets became the main destination for global savings. That position gives the United States what has been called an “exorbitant privilege.” Global demand for dollar assets lowers US borrowing costs and channels foreign savings into American financial markets. It also makes persistent US current account deficits easier to finance: the United States can spend more abroad than it earns there for long periods because the rest of the world is willing to accumulate claims on US assets. The privilege is financial as well as monetary, because the depth and centrality of US capital markets reinforce the dollar’s role, while the dollar’s role reinforces the depth and centrality of those markets.[12]
The same structure produces geopolitical power. Because so much international finance is conducted in dollars or passes through institutions connected to the US financial system, Washington can restrict access to that system as an instrument of foreign policy. Monetary predominance, financial predominance and political predominance thereby reinforce one another, much as Roman political supremacy gradually created economic opportunities and interests that strengthened Rome’s hold over the Mediterranean.[12]
None of this means that the American-centred order benefits only the United States. The dollar provides the world with extraordinarily deep and liquid markets; American financial institutions supply capital and liquidity; and the postwar order helped sustain decades of global growth. That is precisely the point. Hegemonic orders are strongest when the benefits they provide to others are real, while the structure of the system continues to confer disproportionate advantages on the hegemon.
As in the ancient Mediterranean, political hierarchy has economic consequences. Europe’s rupture with Russia has greatly increased the importance of American LNG, while the sharp increase in European defense expenditure creates large markets in which US defense companies are major suppliers. Under NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), European allies and other partners explicitly finance purchases of US military equipment for Ukraine; by June 2026 NATO reported commitments exceeding $6 billion in American-sourced equipment.[13]
The transatlantic trade framework agreed in 2025 makes the connection even more visible. Under the EU-US arrangement, the European Union undertook to remove tariffs on US industrial goods while a 15 percent US tariff applies to a broad range of European exports under the framework. The agreement also records the EU’s intention to procure $750 billion of US LNG, oil and nuclear-energy products through 2028, at least $40 billion of US AI chips, substantially more American military equipment, and envisages $600 billion in additional European investment in the United States.[14]
Not every announced intention will necessarily materialize exactly as stated, but the significance lies in what the arrangement reveals: strategic hierarchy creates economic leverage. The parallel is not that Rome in the second century BC and the United States in 2026 behave identically. Rome could decide which Macedonian resources might be exploited and could reshape Rhodian commerce by changing the status of Delos; the United States operates through entirely different institutions and instruments. The common point is that a power occupying the commanding position in a security system acquires an exceptional capacity to influence economic choices and outcomes within that system. Political predominance changes bargaining power; bargaining power affects markets; and the economic relationships that result can then reinforce the political order that produced them.
The analogy extends to elites. The most efficient hegemonic order is one in which the governing classes of subordinate countries have internalized its strategic assumptions. Their loyalty need not be purchased, nor need they receive instructions from an embassy. They may sincerely believe in the system; it works much better when they do. Careers develop within transnational institutions; political and professional networks cross borders; officials, diplomats, military officers, academics and business leaders develop shared assumptions about which policies are responsible, which are dangerous and which are simply beyond serious consideration. Seen from this perspective, Callicrates suddenly feels much less remote.
There is one final reason why the comparison between second-century BC Greece and twenty-first-century Europe is so suggestive. The Greeks remained convinced, often with good reason, of their extraordinary importance. Only a few generations had passed since Alexander and his successors had carried Greek-Macedonian arms and culture from the Mediterranean to Central Asia and India. Greek remained a lingua franca across the Mediterranean and far beyond it, through West and Central Asia to the lands approaching the Indus that Alexander had reached; Greek literature, philosophy, science and art commanded immense prestige; the Romans themselves were fascinated by Greek civilization.
Yet cultural prestige and geopolitical power were moving in opposite directions. The Greeks remained culturally central while becoming strategically peripheral. Contemporary Europe confronts something similar. For centuries Europeans dominated much of the planet, built global empires and trading systems, and generated many of the political, scientific and intellectual ideas through which the modern world continues to understand itself. Europe remains rich, educated and technologically sophisticated, but the principal concentrations of hard power increasingly lie elsewhere: above all in the United States and China, but also in Russia, which possesses nuclear forces, strategic depth, abundant resources and a demonstrated willingness to employ military power.
Europe possesses enormous wealth, yet it has delegated to another power a significant share of ultimate responsibility for its security. The arrangement has lasted so long that it is easy to mistake it for a permanent feature of the international system. The Greeks of 176 BC might have made the same assumption. Rome did not govern them; it had withdrawn its troops after liberating them and preferred friendly governments, treaties, influence and strategic predominance to the costs of direct administration. For decades, that was indeed the case.
Then circumstances changed. Macedonia moved from constrained independence to direct Roman rule. The Achaean challenge ended with the destruction of Corinth. Mainland Greece was subjected to Roman authority, and eventually Achaia became a Roman province. Over time, the Greek world was incorporated into the Roman imperial system. Why should we assume that the present institutional form of the relationship between Europe and the United States represents its final stage?
The analogy extends far beyond Greece. Greece was only one important part of a much larger world progressively reorganized by Roman power. The process of incorporation unfolded over centuries: Spain; Macedonia and Carthaginian North Africa; Pergamum and the cities of Asia Minor; southern Gaul; the remnants of Seleucid power in Syria; the rest of Gaul to the Rhine and the Balkans to the Danube; Ptolemaic Egypt; and, later, Mauretania and Britain. By then Roman power stretched from the Atlantic deep into West Asia. In our comparison, Europe is Greece, but the wider Roman world is the wider world of today. The American order created after 1945, and extended globally after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was never merely an Atlantic arrangement. Its monetary, financial, commercial and security institutions reached across the international system.
What makes 2026 particularly interesting is that this wider order is itself in flux. One revealing indicator is monetary. In 2000, 71 percent of disclosed global foreign exchange reserves were held in dollars; by the first quarter of 2026 the share had fallen to 57 percent.[15] This is a substantial decline. The dollar nevertheless remains by far the leading reserve currency, while its role in international finance and foreign exchange markets is even larger. Nor has the renminbi simply replaced the dollar: much of the diversification has been spread across other currencies and assets.
The process has also been stimulated by the use of American financial predominance as an instrument of geopolitical power. Sanctions have long exploited the centrality of the dollar and the US financial system, while the measures adopted against Russia after 2022 made unusually visible the political vulnerability that can accompany dependence on financial infrastructure controlled by another power. Even senior US policymakers have warned that the more access to the dollar system is used to enforce American foreign policy objectives, the stronger the incentive for other states to develop alternatives. IMF research likewise finds evidence that exposure to sanctions risk can encourage reserve diversification, including into gold.[15]
BRICS initiatives should be understood in this context. They do not yet constitute a coherent alternative monetary order, much less a replacement for the dollar. But BRICS governments are explicitly pursuing greater use of local currencies, alternative payment arrangements and financial mechanisms intended to reduce dependence on the existing system.[16] The irony is difficult to miss: the very monetary and financial dominance that makes economic sanctions such a powerful instrument of American statecraft also gives rival powers a stronger incentive to build alternatives to it.
Here the analogy reaches one of its most important limits. Rome in 176 BC was an ascending power. Its military superiority was being reinforced by institutional advantages: an extraordinary capacity to mobilize manpower, incorporate allies, co-opt local elites and extend forms of citizenship and participation that allowed conquered or subordinate communities gradually to acquire a stake in Roman power. In the language of modern institutional economics, Rome possessed institutions unusually effective at converting military success into durable political capacity. Its predominance in the Mediterranean had not yet peaked; it was still expanding.
The United States in 2026 occupies a different position in its historical cycle. It remains the world’s most powerful state by many measures and retains unique advantages in finance, technology, alliances and military reach. But its relative predominance is less overwhelming than it was after 1990. China has become an economic power of at least comparable overall weight and has surpassed the United States in manufacturing scale,[17] while other states increasingly seek room for manoeuvre outside institutions built during the period of American predominance. The American order is therefore being challenged at precisely the moment when some of the economic privileges associated with it, most visibly the dominance of the dollar, are showing gradual erosion.[18]
The two dates in our title may therefore capture opposite historical movements. In 176 BC, an old multipolar Mediterranean order was becoming increasingly unipolar. Macedon, Carthage, Ptolemaic Egypt and the great Hellenistic kingdoms still existed, but Rome was ascending and the underlying balance of power was moving steadily in its favor. In 2026, the institutional architecture of American predominance remains extraordinarily powerful, but the underlying distribution of world power appears to be moving in the opposite direction. The post-Cold War unipolar moment has given way to intensifying competition with China, renewed Russian opposition and greater demands for autonomy across the non-Western world. The United States may still reverse that relative erosion. Technological breakthroughs, domestic renewal or the failures of its competitors could alter the trajectory. But as things stand, Rome in 176 BC was a rising hegemon, while America in 2026 is a mature hegemon facing challengers that are gaining relative weight.
Rome itself eventually encountered a limit to expansion. East of the Mediterranean system it had come to dominate, first the Parthian and later the Sasanian empires proved strong enough to resist incorporation. Rome and Iran fought repeatedly, but neither could permanently eliminate the other. Over centuries their rivalry produced a shifting strategic equilibrium across West Asia. Whether the emerging US-China relationship eventually resembles such a durable balance between competing centers of power is another question altogether.
These opposite trajectories make the European side of the comparison even more interesting. If American predominance weakens in the wider world, Washington may have stronger incentives to bind the European core of its system more closely to itself. Greater integration of military command, technology, intelligence, trade, finance, energy and foreign policy could therefore be not the consequence of expanding American global power, but a response to its relative erosion elsewhere. A twenty-first-century empire would not need proconsuls, ships laden with tribute or legionary garrisons, and Europeans might even welcome such an evolution. There would be Roman precedents: Greek elites ultimately prospered within the Roman Empire; they acquired Roman citizenship, entered the imperial aristocracy and helped reshape the civilization of their conquerors. Political integration and cultural vitality proved perfectly compatible.
There is also the opposite possibility. A backlash against the hegemonic order could emerge within Europe if a major state or political movement were able to harness accumulated resentment against American predominance and turn it into a serious political challenge. Like Mithridates, such a challenger would not necessarily seek a world without hegemony; it might seek to replace one hierarchy with another. The ancient precedent is sobering: his challenge failed, and its failure accelerated Roman consolidation in the East. A failed attempt to escape a hegemonic order can produce tighter integration rather than liberation.
History offers no timetable and no predetermined ending, but it does warn us against confusing a particular institutional arrangement with the natural order of things. In 196 BC, the Greeks cheered Rome for making them free. In 176 BC, they were still free: they had governments, laws, assemblies and ambassadors. What they were progressively losing was the ability to make the most important geopolitical choices without taking account of the preferences of the incomparably stronger power on which the regional order depended. A century later, much of the Greek world was Roman.
Perhaps the question to ask of Europe in 2026 is therefore not whether it is sovereign. The Greeks were sovereign too. The question is what sovereignty ultimately means when the power on which it rests is provided by somebody else.
[1] Plutarch, Flamininus 10.3–4. The proclamation describes the Greeks as ἐλευθέρους, ἀφρουρήτους, ἀφορολογήτους, νόμοις χρωμένους τοῖς πατρίοις: free, ungarrisoned, exempt from tribute, and governed according to their ancestral laws.
[2] Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, Book III, especially Chapters VIII–X on the eastern states, the Second Macedonian War, the war with Antiochus, and the Third Macedonian War. Mommsen’s broader interpretation emphasizes the cumulative movement from intervention and supremacy toward more direct control.
[3] Polybius, Histories 24.10, within the wider discussion at 24.8–11: δεῖ τοὺς μὲν τοῖς αὐτῆς δόγμασιν συνηγοροῦντας αὔξειν, τοὺς δ᾽ ἀντιλέγοντας ταπεινοῦν - those who supported Rome’s decisions should be strengthened, those who opposed them weakened.
[4] Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 45.18.6–7; 45.29, on the Macedonian settlement, including the division into four republics, tribute, mines, salt and shipbuilding timber. Livy describes Macedonia as having been granted libertatem salubri moderatione datam and records that it was to pay Rome half the tribute formerly paid to its kings: dimidium tributi, quam quod regibus ferre soliti erant, populo Romano pendere.
[5] Polybius, Histories 30.31. The Rhodian ambassadors contrasted approximately one million drachmas in former harbor revenues with roughly 150,000 after Delos became a free port.
[6] Cicero, Pro lege Manilia 6–7, on Roman revenues and the private fortunes of Roman citizens invested in Asia.
[7] On the complex status of Greece after 146 BC, see Robert Morstein Kallet-Marx, Hegemony to Empire: The Development of the Roman Imperium in the East from 148 to 62 B.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Frédéric Hurlet and Christel Müller, “L’Achaïe à l’époque républicaine (146–27 av. J.-C.): une province introuvable?”, Chiron 50 (2020), 49–100. Hurlet and Müller argue that Rome created a provincia called Graecia in 146 BC, but without continuously assigning a promagistrate to it, an illustration of how the Republican provincia was not yet equivalent to the fixed territorial province of the later Empire. Achaia was established as a separate senatorial province under Augustus in 27 BC.
[8] Giovanni Brizzi, Storia di Roma. 1. Dalle origini ad Azio (Bologna: Pàtron, 1997); Giovanni Brizzi, Imperium. Il potere a Roma (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2024), especially on fides, alliance and the progressive incorporation of local elites into Roman power.
[9] Appian, Mithridatic Wars 4.22–23, for the coordinated killings of Romans and Italians in Asia and the ancient casualty tradition.
[10] John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001; updated ed. 2014), for the offensive-realist framework concerning great powers, regional hegemony and alliance politics.
[11] US Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Marshall Plan, 1948.” The official historical account notes both the program’s contribution to European industrial recovery and its role in stimulating the American economy by establishing markets for American goods.
[12] On the international role of the dollar and the financial advantages associated with it, see Carol Bertaut, Bastian von Beschwitz and Stephanie Curcuru, “The International Role of the U.S. Dollar—2025 Edition,” Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, 18 July 2025; and Carol Bertaut, Steven Kamin and Charles Thomas, “How Long Can the Unsustainable U.S. Current Account Deficit Be Sustained?”, Federal Reserve Board, International Finance Discussion Papers. On foreign acquisition of US securities and the financing of US external deficits, see Bertaut, Kamin and Thomas, “Assessing the Potential for Further Foreign Demand for U.S. Assets,” IFDP No. 950 (2008).
[13] NATO, “NATO’s support for Ukraine,” updated 2026. As of June 2026, NATO reports that Allies had committed more than $6 billion to US-sourced military equipment under PURL.
[14] European Commission and United States, “Joint Statement on a United States-European Union framework on an agreement on reciprocal, fair and balanced trade,” 21 August 2025. The statement records the energy, AI-chip, investment and defense-purchase intentions described above.
[15] IMF, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER), “World Official Foreign Currency Reserves Largely Unchanged in the First Quarter of 2026,” IMF Data Brief, 1 July 2026: the dollar share was 57 percent in 2026Q1. Federal Reserve Board, “The International Role of the U.S. Dollar—2025 Edition,” reports 71 percent for 2000 and stresses that diversification has been spread across several currencies. See also Serkan Arslanalp, Barry Eichengreen and Chima Simpson-Bell, “Dollar Dominance in the International Reserve System: An Update,” IMF, 11 June 2024; Arslanalp, Eichengreen and Simpson-Bell, “Gold as International Reserves: A Barbarous Relic No More?”, IMF Working Paper 2023/014, which finds an association between financial sanctions and increased central-bank gold shares; Gita Gopinath, “Geopolitics and its Impact on Global Trade and the Dollar,” IMF, 7 May 2024. On the risk that sanctions overreach encourages migration away from the dollar system, see US Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, “Remarks on the Evolution of Sanctions and Lessons for the Future,” 30 March 2016.
[16] BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, Joint Statement, 2024, especially section 5 on local currencies, the BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative, BRICS Clear and settlement in local currencies; see also the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Chair’s Statement, 29 April 2025, para. 40.
[17] On manufacturing scale, see UNIDO, International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics 2024, which reports China at 32 percent of global manufacturing value added in 2023, compared with about 15 percent for the United States.
[18] On geoeconomic fragmentation and the changing use of international currencies, see Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Andrea F. Presbitero and Petia Topalova, “Changing Global Linkages: A New Cold War?”, IMF Working Paper 2024/076; Jakree Koosakul, Longmei Zhang and Maryam Zia, “Geopolitical Proximity and the Use of Global Currencies,” IMF Working Paper 2024/189; and Gopinath, “Geopolitics and its Impact on Global Trade and the Dollar,” IMF, 7 May 2024.