February marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The legacy of Gibbon’s fundamental thesis can be found in President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (November 2025). Both argue that Western civilization is on a dangerous course unless it returns to the traditional civic virtue and patriotism that made it strong.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was an English author, politician, and historian. His writing was informed by a variety of life experiences, including military service, travel across Europe, and conversion to Catholicism (and re-conversion to Protestantism).
His Decline and Fall was a lifetime achievement. Published in six volumes between 1776-1789, those who have not read it often have a mistaken impression about the history that it covers and a misperception about Gibbon’s analysis. The historical period covered in Decline and Fall is primarily from 98 A.D. to 1590 A.D., in other words from the time of the Antonine emperors (e.g., Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, etc.) through the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D., and yet following developments in Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). Gibbon’s extensive inquiry into the Byzantine Empire and the medieval Roman Catholic Church, is where most of his criticism directed at institutional Christianity occurs.
Of course, in the background for Gibbon, is the history of republican Rome through the early empire. Gibbon argued that the long decline of Rome’s cultural character and social virility was caused by a loss of civic virtue, what Cicero called “civitas” and what we might today call a sort of confident, active patriotism that is rooted in one’s religious and moral tradition. Gibbon saw the loss of Roman civilizational values – the ideas of personal responsibility, virtue, and active citizenship – associated with the earlier period as in long-term decay by the time of the Antonines.
First among the causes of that loss, despite periods of reform and recovery, was the decadence of Rome’s elite culture that turned away from a sort of Stoic, agrarian ethic of the Roman republic to an increasingly hedonistic and extravagant lifestyle. This caused massive private and public debt, which in turn resulted in an economic situation where the state continued to subsidize the lifestyle of its citizens: “bread and circuses.”
A second contributor to the loss of Roman civic virtue was the dilution of what it meant to be a Roman citizen. As the empire expanded a set of reforms allowed easy entry into being a Roman citizen with few responsibilities or clear commitments. Rome ceased to assimilate new people groups into the values of republican Rome, and thus the spread of empire, unmanaged immigration, and, according to Gibbon, cultural changes due to popular Christianity, all contributed to a decline in what Roman identity was all about.
Gibbon’s argument about the loss of civic virtue can be found in President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS).
The NSS begins dramatically: “How America Went Astray” and “President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Corrective.” Part of the way that the country went astray was disastrous spending without restraint and purpose: “elites overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.”
The “corrective” is two-fold. Part of it is a refocusing on America’s “core, vital national interests,” which include some ideational components. The second has been to dispose of unhelpful elements such as gender ideology imposed on the armed services and uncontrolled borders with mass migration.
All of this can be overcome when we begin with a focus on “the God-given rights of [American] citizens and prioritize their well-being … soft power based on pride in our past and our identity … and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health [and] … families.”
President Trumps 2025 identifies five core national interests: a stable and prosperous Western Hemisphere; a vigorous response to attacks on the U.S. economy by foreign actors with a special focus on the Indo-Pacific; a reinvigoration of the Western alliance “while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity;” prevent any adversary from dominating the Middle East; and, ensure U.S. technology and standards … drive the world (economy) forward” (e.g., AI, quantum computing, biotechnology).
Comments about Europe’s “crisis of confidence” in the NSS are reminiscent of Gibbon. Trump’s NSS is written in the context of declining European fertility rates and simultaneous mass migration. Statistics suggest that in the coming decades, Sweden will be 30% Muslim and much of Western Europe will be 15-20% Muslim. It may be that the two dominant ideologies of younger Europeans are either a radically progressive, neo-Marxist, statist, climate activist mentality, or, for a minority, that of the Islamists who have made some inner cities in the UK, Brussels, France and elsewhere off limits to public authorities.
This seems to be what the NSS is referring to when it asks whether tomorrow’s European leaders of NATO have the same commitments to the convictions of the North Atlantic Charter as those who originally signed it? When one considers how much Europe has sacrificed its energy security to Russia, at least until very recently, the criticisms inherent in the NSS make sense. Moreover, when one looks at not just the dramatic decline of Christian practice in Europe, but government attacks in London and elsewhere on Christians, it seems as if America is losing its civilizational allies.
In contrast, the NSS trumpets America’s “soft power and cultural influence” alongside its economic, military, financial, and diplomatic power. Furthermore, a crucial “means” to America’s “ends” is the “courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people.”
To understand President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, one cannot fixate on the critics’ tweets that it is too short, too America First, or lacking in length and elegance. The criticisms that it is solely focused on hard power and selfish American materialist interests is just wrong. One must engage the ideational elements that undergird that strategy.
Gibbon helps us here by emphasizing culture, values, and civic virtue. Like Gibbon, the authors of the NSS see a civilizational loss of civic virtue in the West, but see America has having turned a corner and energetically seeking reform in our culture and institutions. This element of the NSS is worth our consideration, discussion, and debate.
