From Rome to America — Why Empires Fight Over Israel | Prof. Jiang Xueqin

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Let me tell you something that nobody in Washington wants you to understand.

[00:00:04]Nobody in Brussels will say it on television. Nobody at the Council on Foreign Relations, nobody at the Brookings Institution, nobody who went to Yale or Harvard or the Kennedy School of Government will ever admit this to you publicly. Because if they did, the entire mythology they have built, this mythology of democracy, of humanitarian intervention, of the rules-based international order, that mythology would collapse overnight. Here is the truth. Israel is not a cause. Israel is not even a country in the way that most countries are countries. Israel is a strategic asset. Israel is a piece on a chessboard. And the game being played on that chessboard is the same game that has been played for over 2,000 years.

[00:00:49]The game of who controls the land bridge between three continents, between Europe, Asia, and Africa. The game of who controls the gateway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, between the oil fields of Arabia and the shipping lanes that feed the entire global economy. That game did not begin with Truman recognizing Israel in 1948.

[00:01:10]That game did not begin with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. That game began in Rome. And if you do not understand Rome, you cannot understand what is happening in the Middle East today. You simply cannot. Now, I want you to think about this very carefully. The Roman Empire at its height was not powerful because it had great generals, although it did. It was not powerful because it had great engineers, although it built roads across three continents. The Roman Empire was powerful because it understood something that very few empires in human history have ever truly understood. Geography is destiny. If you control the choke points, you control the trade. If you control the trade, you control the wealth. If you control the wealth, you control everything. The armies, the politics, the religion, the culture, the narrative. Everything flows from the choke points. And Rome knew that the most important choke point on Earth was the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, that thin strip of land where today we find Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. Rome did not fight three wars against Judea. The First Jewish-Roman War, the Second Jewish-Roman War, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, because the Romans hated Jews. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of history that has been fed to us our entire lives. Rome fought those wars because Judea sat at the intersection of the empire's most critical trade and military routes. Judea was the hinge, and empires cannot afford for the hinge to be controlled by anyone they do not control. Do you understand what I am telling you? This is not ancient history. This is a pattern, and patterns repeat themselves because human nature does not change, geography does not change, and the laws of power do not change. Now, fast forward. Rome falls.

[00:02:55]What replaces Rome? Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, sitting in Constantinople, still controlling the Eastern Mediterranean, still fighting over that same Levantine corridor. Then the Islamic caliphates come. The Umayyads, the Abbasids, they understand the game immediately. They conquer the Levant not primarily for religious reasons, although religion is always the public justification that empires use, always, without exception. They conquer it because whoever holds Jerusalem, whoever holds the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean, holds the keys to three continents. Then the Crusaders arrive from Europe, 11 expeditions, 200 years of warfare. You think those knights traveled thousands of miles in the heat, dying by the hundreds of thousands, because they were worried about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Please.

[00:03:45]The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the pretext. The trade routes were the prize. The Crusades were an early European attempt at what we today would call imperial projection into a resource-rich strategic corridor. Then the Ottomans, then Napoleon. And this is where it gets fascinating because Napoleon understood the game with extraordinary clarity. He marched into Egypt in 1798.

[00:04:10]He then marched into Palestine. He besieged Acre. He wanted to cut the Ottoman Empire in half and establish a French strategic presence in the Levant that would allow France to outflank Britain's trade routes to India.

[00:04:22]Napoleon was not lost. Napoleon was not confused. Napoleon was playing the same game that Rome had played 1,700 years before him. Geography is destiny. The choke points are the prize. And then Britain wins. Britain defeats Napoleon.

[00:04:36]Britain takes Egypt. Britain gets the Suez Canal. Britain issues the Balfour Declaration in 1917. And here is where most people completely misread history because they read the Balfour Declaration as a moral gesture, as a humanitarian act, as a promise made to the Jewish people. And that is the lie that has been constructed around it.

[00:04:56]Lord Balfour, Lord Rothschild, the architects of that declaration, they were not humanitarians. They were strategists of the British Empire at the precise moment when Britain was fighting the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, when Britain needed to establish a loyal, reliable, permanent strategic presence in the Eastern Mediterranean that would protect the Suez Canal, that would protect the oil fields that were just beginning to be discovered in Arabia and Persia. They needed a garrison state, a state that would be perpetually dependent on British protection, perpetually loyal, perpetually useful as a forward operating base in the most strategically critical real estate on the planet. That is the Balfour Declaration when you strip away the mythology. Now Britain is exhausted after two World Wars. The empire is bankrupt. And who steps into the vacuum? America. And America inherits, as all successor empires inherit from their predecessors, America inherits the strategic logic. You do not choose your geography, you inherit it.

[00:05:57]And the strategic logic of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, the land bridge between three continents, it does not change because the dominant empire changes. The logic persists. The chess piece persists, only the hand moving it changes. And so, America inherits Israel. And America funds Israel over three and a half trillion dollars in military and economic aid since 1948, if you count it all carefully. America provides Israel with a nuclear umbrella.

[00:06:27]America vetoes every UN Security Council resolution that threatens Israel year after year after year. And the question that the American public is never allowed to seriously ask is why. Why would the most powerful country in human history commit so completely, so irrevocably, so expensively to this one small state? The answer they are given is because of shared democratic values, because of the Holocaust, because of moral obligation. These are the public justifications. These are, to use the precise historical term, the pretexts.

[00:07:00]The actual reason is the same reason Rome fought three wars in Judea, the same reason Napoleon marched to Acre, the same reason Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. The Eastern Mediterranean is the choke point between East and West. Whoever controls it controls the flow of energy, the flow of trade, the flow of military power between Asia, Europe, and Africa. In the age of oil, in the 20th and early 21st centuries, that means controlling the approach to the Persian Gulf. That means being able to project power into the heart of the Arab world. That means having a military platform from which you can threaten Iran, threaten Russia's southern flank, threaten China's energy supply lines. Israel is not an ally.

[00:07:43]Israel is an aircraft carrier that cannot be sunk. That is the actual strategic calculus. Now, here is where we are today and this is where historical pattern recognition becomes indispensable. Every empire that has overextended into the Eastern Mediterranean, that has made the mistake of believing it can hold that corridor indefinitely through military force alone without addressing the fundamental political and demographic realities on the ground, every single one of those empires has ultimately exhausted itself and retreated. Rome exhausted itself.

[00:08:15]The Crusaders exhausted themselves.

[00:08:17]Napoleon exhausted himself. The British Empire, which at its peak controlled a quarter of the Earth's surface, exhausted itself in precisely this region and was forced to hand the problem to America. And now we are watching in real time whether America will repeat the same pattern, whether the same strategic logic that drove empire after empire into this corridor will drive the last great Western empire to the same point of exhaustion. Because what we are witnessing today, the wars in Gaza, the confrontations with Iran, the proxy conflicts in Lebanon and Syria, the American military build-up in the region, the desperate attempts to forge a strategic realignment through the Abraham Accords, none of this is new. None of it is unprecedented. All of it is the latest iteration of the oldest game in the world. The game for the choke points. The game for the land bridge. The game that Rome started and that every empire since Rome has been compelled to continue playing not because they chose to, but because the geography demands it. Because the resources demand it. Because the logic of imperial power demands it. And China is watching. China is waiting. China is building the Belt and Road, which is the largest infrastructure project in human history. China is building relationships across the Middle East, across Africa, across Central Asia. China is doing what every rising empire does. It is quietly, patiently, methodically preparing to play the same game. Because China understands what the ruling class in Washington, drunk on its own mythology of exceptionalism, has forgotten.

[00:09:52]Geography is destiny. The choke points are the prize. And the Eastern Mediterranean, that thin strip of contested, blood-soaked, ancient, strategic land, it was the hinge of the Roman Empire. And it will be the hinge of whatever world order comes next. The question is simply which empire will be holding it.