As the United States marks its 250th year, it faces not one but a series of escalating military conflicts across multiple continents. Robert D. Kaplan, writing in Foreign Affairs, has framed this moment in stark historical terms: if America cannot break its pattern of stumbling into what Kaplan calls middle-sized wars - conflicts too large to ignore but too small to unite the country - the result could be a rupture between citizens and their leaders that slowly kills the republic itself.

Kaplan's argument, detailed in a Foreign Affairs essay and reported by "Hvylya", begins with a blunt premise: the United States "exists in the world as a de facto empire," and empire carries built-in risks. "Misbegotten wars are embedded in the history of imperialism itself," Kaplan wrote. "The point of imperialism is to involve the empire in places that are potentially beneficial but not necessarily vital to its national interest."

This imperial condition explains why the cycle keeps repeating despite public opposition. After each middle-sized war - Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - Americans declared such conflicts over forever. Yet each time, a new set of circumstances, miscalculations, and escalatory pressures produced a new one. Kaplan argued that "repeated involvement in periodic middle-sized wars, even as public officials and civilians alike declare they will never happen again, reflects the modern imperial condition of the United States."

The consequences are cumulative. Middle-sized wars do not just waste resources and destroy individual presidencies. They erode something more fundamental: the relationship between a democracy's citizens and its governing class. Kaplan warned that if the current trajectory continues, "there may be a fatal split between the public and its governing elite." The effects, he added, are "unlikely to be immediate, but such divisions are how republics slowly die."

The empires that have survived longest, Kaplan noted, are those that avoided this trap. The Byzantine Empire lasted over a thousand years "by doing everything possible to avoid open warfare." Today's America, simultaneously engaged in military operations in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria while maintaining a posture of deterrence in the Pacific, is doing something closer to the opposite.

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