There is more truth to this than most realize. History is not kind to superpowers. Those nations that are able to establish empires and fight the world’s wars, inevitably lose so much of the “warrior gene”. Not all men carry this. Those predisposed to military and law enforcement service carry it to a larger degree than most but even in those cases not all do. When your nation is at war over a long period of time, that pool is naturally reduced. It happened to Rome, it happened to Spain, it happened to Britain, France and Germany and Japan. Now Germany, France and Japan were never superpowers but they were very much regional powers with global imperial aspirations. Will it happen to us?
Of course you might also draw the connection that the reduction of the “warrior gene” in the national stock leads to a parallel effect of increased socialism as well. Government imposed socialism acting as a false promise of protection and provision for those who refuse to do for themselves and their community. Just some thoughts I’ve been tossing around lately as I’ve been reading about the Roman Empire and comparing it to the recent violence in England and our own national decline.
I've always been deeply sceptical of that argument as applied to the British in the twentieth century (as it often is), for a number of reasons.
Firstly because so many of those who fought and died in the two world wars were conscripts, so it was a matter of chance whether or not they had a predisposition to the military life. Secondly because the random nature of the destruction in industrialised modern warfare made it a matter of chance whether those killed were or were not the bravest. Thirdly because the genes of many who were killed survived, either through offspring conceived before their death or through siblings (of both sexes) who shared their genes and survived the wars. Fourthly because large numbers of men carrying the 'warrior gene' were either too young or too old to fight during those war years. And finally because the numbers of fatalities as a percentage of the number serving and as a percentage of the total population, even in the much larger losses of the First World War, were not enough to significantly change the national gene pool.