For the past week or so, I’ve been in the Netherlands on vacation. And since my wife majored in art history, that has meant a lot of time in museums, soaking in the works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the other masters of the Dutch Golden Age. 

Every educated person has at least a passing familiarity with the Dutch Golden Age, of course: The period, essentially coextensive with the 17th century, when a tiny republic on Europe’s northwestern fringe not only blazed with artistic genius, but also invented modern capitalism, dominated the world's maritime trade, and established a far-flung colonial empire. 

But less well-known is the era that followed: the evocatively named “Periwig Period” (Pruikentijd, in Dutch) of the 18th century. Unlike the glorious 1600s, these were years of complacency and stagnation, during which the country lost its commercial dynamism, its naval supremacy, and its geopolitical importance. Dutch painting descended into pastiche, and the intellectual energy with which Amsterdam had crackled departed for other climes. Holland became comfortable, stable—and a backwater. “After 1700,” the great historian J.H. Plumb tells us, “the Dutch contributed little to the civilization of Europe. The startling beauty of their waterborne cities, so modern and so functional in the 17th century, acquired the patina of age,” and their inhabitants, he adds ruefully, “began to live in the past.”

More than three hundred years later, the fear of entering our own version of a Periwig Period increasingly grips American elites. Last Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio extolled the need for civilizational vitality in a speech in Athens, with the majestic ruins of the Acropolis as a backdrop. He lamented that many in the modern West had forgotten the example of their classical forebears, who exemplified “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk, and glory.” Warning against the passive acceptance of weakness and decay, Rubio urged the recovery of an ethos centered on power and action, invoking the ancient Greek notion of θυμός: “the fire of passion, strength, courage, [and] pride.” America’s top diplomat exhorted us all, in other words, to stave off decline by living heroically.

Stirring stuff. But insofar as this ethos has served him as a guide to statecraft, it must be said it leaves something to be desired. Contra the careful attention to consequences and deft realpolitik that has characterized the most successful diplomatic minds of the Western tradition, Rubio’s read of the classics translates into a fundamental bias for action—however crude and destructive—over inaction. On this view, it is always and everywhere better to be in the arena than on the sidelines, even if all one is doing is flailing about and absorbing blows. With this comes an emphasis on force and domination, which leads naturally to an overindexing on military might, and a corresponding sense that the retention of power depends on its frequent exercise. 

Yet is not the opposite more often the case? The story of our involvement in the Middle East, for example, is the story of the frittering away of American strength through its clumsy employment in the service of foolish, even impossible, ends. Likewise the tales of other powers that have toppled from the first rank—the embrace by Germans and Japanese of bloodthirsty militarism in the ’30s, Britain’s reckless plunge into the First World War, even France’s glory days under Napoleon. When all is said and done, embracing the libido dominandi tends rather to corrode than to strengthen one’s civilization.

This, at any rate, is what is happening in Iran, where the White House is squandering American lives, money, and munitions to pursue an unattainable goal and eliminate a phantom threat. One fears it may yet happen in Latin America, where we have enthusiastically embraced the notion that might makes right and elected to swing our big stick around with reckless abandon. Even in Europe, where the accomplishment of a truly heroic feat—wresting America free of its military entanglements on the continent—is still alluringly in prospect, we instead spend our time doubling down on ham-fisted efforts to shape the Old World’s domestic politics and compel its denizens to be based (Rubio’s speech, of course, being but the latest example of this).

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An aversion to the fate that befell the Dutch is understandable. Gradually sliding into irrelevance—however comfortable—is something from which every red-blooded American should recoil in disgust. But a Periwig Period is only one way for societies to go down; nor is it clear that this is the likeliest trajectory for our own (hypothetical) decline. 

And when it comes to the Dutch themselves, one can even argue they played their hand fairly well. A tiny country living in a neighborhood of ferocious, far-larger predators couldn’t sit in the top rank forever, especially given its citizens’ internal divisions and predilection for political liberty. Not that there was a lack of voices urging them on to ruin; these sturdy burghers had their own neocon-types to contend with, fanatical Calvinists who urged war to the death against papist Spain and France. In the end, though, cooler heads prevailed: the Dutch fought when they had to, and made peace when they could. Indeed, their realism even infuriated would-be allies like Cromwell, who sought to form a kind of Protestant International with Holland. (Informed of the latter’s rejection of the project, the Lord Protector thundered that the Dutch had “preferred gain to godliness.”) But had the hawks carried the day, the Netherlands probably would have been dismantled or swallowed whole by its enemies, its national life more or less extinguished.

America’s circumstances are vastly different, to be sure. Our means are gigantic; a gargantuan economy, a peerless—even if not omnipotent—military, and a hegemonic culture together seem proof against external threats for at least a few more decades. No, for the United States, a spectacular flame-out seems more likely than a slow fade. The combustion of our national resources and energies in a succession of avoidable crises is more to be feared, I think, than a long period of managed decline. And the Greek watchword here is not θυμός but ὕβρις—hubris.