There is an old proverb, worn smooth by centuries of use in a dozen languages, that too many cooks spoil the broth. A companion saying, less quotable but truer, holds that there is never enough agreement to decide, but always enough to delay. And beneath both sits a harder observation, one that historians have been rediscovering in every collapsed empire from Rome to the Qing: when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Committees do not lose wars or empires. They simply fail to notice, in any timely manner, that they are losing them.
This is not an argument against democracy so much as an argument about democracy's purpose. Shared rule buys legitimacy, flexibility, and the capacity to correct course without bloodshed — real advantages, and rare ones in the historical record. But it has always carried a cost: diffuse responsibility can curdle into drift, and drift, sustained long enough, has a way of resolving itself through forces far less gentle than an election. Historians from Polybius to Ibn Khaldun noticed a version of this pattern so often that they built entire theories of history around it. Strip away the particulars of any given empire, and a recurring shape emerges: conflict forges cohesion; cohesion, once successful, relaxes into compromise and expansion; expansion, sustained long enough, breeds the complacency of comfort; and complacency eventually invites a harder, hungrier rival to take what the old order can no longer defend. Then the cycle begins again.
It is tempting to treat this as a museum piece — a pattern that explains Rome's fifth-century unraveling or the Ming dynasty's collapse into Manchu hands, interesting to specialists, irrelevant to anyone reading a newspaper today. That temptation should be resisted. In March 2026, Freedom House reported that the United States had posted the sharpest one-year decline in its freedom score of any nation still classified as free, falling out of the world's top twenty for the first time since the organization began publishing numerical scores in 2002. Weeks later, the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, which has tracked democratic health across the globe for decades, went further: it reclassified the United States as no longer a liberal democracy at all, moving it into the category of “electoral democracy” and noting that the country's institutional protections had fallen back to roughly where they stood in 1965. V-Dem called it the largest single-year drop in American democratic standing in the history of its dataset. None of this settles the question of whether the United States is living through the “stability breeds complacency” chapter of the old cycle, or simply enduring an unusually rough political season. But it makes the question worth asking with the historians' pattern open on the desk beside the day's headlines.
I. Conflict Creates Cohesion
Early states were almost always forged under duress. A people facing extinction tends to tolerate hardship, hierarchy, and sacrifice, because survival requires unity in a way that comfort never demands. Shared struggle manufactures identity more reliably than shared prosperity ever has.
Rome is the clearest case. The Punic Wars transformed a modest Italian republic into a Mediterranean power, but only after generations of Romans lived under near-continuous military pressure — wars with neighboring tribes, Hannibal's invasion of the Italian peninsula itself, and a frontier that never felt secure. That pressure produced a culture built around discipline, civic duty, austere leadership, and collective identity, in which the Roman elite earned legitimacy through sacrifice and competence rather than birthright alone. A very different people arrived at a similar place by a similar road: the tribes that Genghis Khan united emerged from a brutal steppe environment where weakness meant literal extinction, an environment that rewarded mobility, merit, harsh discipline, and adaptability above all else. The result was the most expansionist land empire in history. The early Islamic conquests followed a comparable logic, as intense tribal consolidation in Arabia, forged under religious and military pressure, produced a newly unified Arab force that swept outward against Byzantine and Sassanian rivals who had exhausted themselves fighting each other for generations.
II. Success Enables Compromise and Expansion
Once survival is secured, successful powers tend to loosen. No empire rules by coercion alone forever; expansion demands diplomacy, bureaucracy, law, trade, and the absorption of outsiders, and the harsh tribal identity that won the war softens into a more cosmopolitan administration that can hold the peace.
Under emperors like Augustus, Rome shifted from a survival-state into a managerial civilization, leaning increasingly on taxation, infrastructure, provincial integration, and negotiated elite loyalty. Former enemies became Romans in fact as well as name. This is usually the phase that produces a civilization's most visible flourishing — roads, literacy, engineering, commerce, art, even scientific exchange — because security finally allows for specialization. The Ottoman Empire sustained itself across centuries through a similar architecture of layered compromise: local autonomy, religious toleration, negotiated tax arrangements, and the incorporation of conquered elites into the imperial project rather than their elimination. Han China followed its own version, institutionalizing bureaucratic governance over sheer warrior rule, and using the stability that followed to fund real advances in technology and culture.
III. Stability Breeds Complacency
Long success changes incentives in a way that rarely announces itself. The generation that built a system is eventually replaced by generations born into it, for whom institutions designed to ensure survival quietly become instruments of comfort, status, and internal competition instead. The symptoms tend to recur across very different civilizations: bureaucratic sclerosis, elite decadence, declining military vigor, widening inequality, factionalism, a growing dependence on mercenaries or outside labor to do the hard work the founding generation once did itself, and an eroding sense of shared civic purpose.
By the late Western Roman Empire, military recruitment had weakened, political corruption had intensified, and frontier defense had become inconsistent, even as elites increasingly prioritized luxury and court intrigue over the state's resilience. Rome still possessed immense wealth; it had simply lost the cohesion that wealth alone cannot buy. The military writer Vegetius, watching this unfold, lamented the army's declining discipline in terms that could be lifted almost unchanged into a modern op-ed. The Abbasid Caliphate tells a similar story from a different angle: it achieved a level of cultural sophistication that still shapes the modern world, even as real military authority drained away toward Turkish slave-soldier elites and the caliphate fragmented into semi-independent regional powers. The late Qing dynasty offers a third variation, struggling under bureaucratic inertia, population pressure, and corruption that left an enormous, culturally rich civilization simply unable to adapt quickly enough to industrial military powers arriving from outside.
IV. Harder Rivals at the Periphery
A recurring and slightly uncomfortable historical truth is that powerful civilizations are usually conquered not by more advanced societies, but by more cohesive and hungrier ones arriving from the margins. Peripheral peoples are frequently poorer and less administratively sophisticated than the civilizations they eventually overrun — but more adaptive, more unified, and considerably more willing to endure hardship.
The Western Roman Empire did not fall to any single overwhelming invasion; it gave way to the cumulative pressure of Germanic groups arriving alongside its own internal weakening. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, and Vandals — peoples once dismissed as barbarians — eventually became the rulers of former Roman territory, even as they inherited Roman law, Christianity, and administrative practice in the process. Conquest, in other words, transmitted civilization nearly as much as it destroyed it. The Mongols provide a starker example, overwhelming states — the Jin, the Khwarezmian empire, the Abbasids, Kievan Rus — that were vastly richer and more administratively developed than the Mongols themselves, because Mongol military cohesion simply outmatched more bureaucratically rigid opponents. The Manchu conquest of Ming China followed the same script on a different stage: a comparatively small Manchu population overran a far larger civilization partly because the Ming state was already suffering internal decay, fiscal crisis, and rebellion. In each case, a disciplined power from the frontier overtook a larger but exhausted civilization at precisely the moment that civilization could least afford it.
V. The Conquerors Become the New Civilization
Conquerors rarely remain purely what they were when they arrived; they are transformed by what they conquer nearly as thoroughly as they transform it. The Franks became Christian kings. The Mongols adopted Chinese and Persian governance. The Manchus became Chinese emperors in every respect that mattered. The Normans became administrators as much as warriors. The cycle then simply repeats itself: hard expansion, institutionalization, prosperity, complacency, replacement.
Historians disagree about whether any of this is truly inevitable, but many have arrived at their own versions of the same insight. Ibn Khaldun argued that hardy peoples from outside a civilization's comfortable core conquer decadent urban societies precisely because of the social cohesion — what he called asabiyyah — that harsh conditions instill, only to be softened by luxury themselves within a few generations, setting the whole process up to repeat. Oswald Spengler described civilizations as organisms moving inexorably from vitality toward a kind of rigid old age. Arnold Toynbee emphasized “challenge and response,” arguing that civilizations rise specifically because they succeed in answering severe pressures, and falter when they stop facing any. Joseph Tainter took a more structural view, arguing that complexity itself eventually becomes too costly for any society to sustain efficiently, regardless of its founders' intentions.
And yet civilization, taken as a whole, keeps advancing despite all this collapse and conquest, because knowledge tends to accumulate across centuries even when any single political order does not survive to enjoy it. Roman roads informed medieval trade routes long after Rome itself had fallen. Islamic scholars preserved and expanded Greek science through the very centuries when much of that knowledge might otherwise have been lost. Chinese inventions spread steadily westward. Conquered peoples reshaped their conquerors as often as the reverse. History, seen this way, looks less like a straight line rising steadily upward and more like a relay race: one civilization exhausts itself, another inherits and reorganizes what it built, and human complexity ratchets gradually higher across a time scale too long for any single generation to see whole.
VI. A New Dynamic
The twentieth century altered this ancient cycle more profoundly than anything since the invention of the state itself. Industrialization, global finance, nuclear weapons, mass communication, and sheer technological scale changed what empire, conquest, and even civilizational competition actually meant. The old pattern had worked through military exhaustion, territorial invasion, demographic replacement, and physical conquest. Beginning with the British Empire and accelerating under the United States, power became instead economic, financial, technological, cultural, informational, and institutional — rather than, first and foremost, territorial.
Earlier empires typically extracted tribute from conquered land. Britain did something different: it industrialized first, dominated global shipping, controlled international finance, insured the world's trade, and standardized international commerce, with the Royal Navy protecting a global economic network more than a contiguous land empire. The Industrial Revolution changed the scale of power completely — for the first time in history, productivity mattered more than raw population, factories more than farmland, coal and steel more than cavalry, finance more than plunder. Britain's dominance rested less on annexing its neighbors than on controlling sea lanes, banking, insurance, manufacturing, and the rules of trade itself. That was historically new, and it made outright conquest a comparatively poor investment: an advanced economy destroyed in war was often worth less than the same economy left intact and folded into a trading system. Britain increasingly preferred compliant partners, naval dominance, debt relationships, and strategic ports to the costly business of direct occupation. The empire became as much a system of influence as a structure of rule.
Then the old model tried to reassert itself, and broke against its own weight. World War I shattered the older logic of great-power competition, as European powers destroyed themselves technologically faster than they could benefit strategically from the destruction. Industrial war produced mass mechanized death, crushing debt, social revolution, demographic collapse, and political extremism, leaving victorious powers emerging almost as damaged as the defeated — a genuine historical discontinuity, since earlier conquerors had usually emerged from their wars stronger, not weaker. Britain technically won both world wars and lost its financial supremacy and imperial capacity anyway, becoming dependent on American financing and unable to sustain global dominance any longer. Its empire dissolved not through invasion but through economic exhaustion, rising colonial nationalism, shifting moral legitimacy, and the emergence of larger industrial superpowers around it. That, too, was unprecedented in scale.
The United States inherited this new kind of power and expanded it into something stranger still: a civilization-scale system that often dominates without formal imperial annexation at all. American influence was built on reserve-currency status, technological leadership, military reach, media, universities, multinational corporations, and global institutions — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO, the dollar system, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the technical standards underlying the Internet itself. In many regions, that influence became stronger than classical occupation would ever have been. Nuclear weapons then froze the oldest mechanism of the cycle almost entirely: where rising powers had always eventually tested declining ones militarily, a world in which total war between major states risked mutual annihilation created a strange new condition in which great powers could compete intensely without ever conquering one another outright. Competition shifted instead toward proxy wars, economic pressure, intelligence contests, technological races, ideology, and — more recently — supply chains and cyber systems. The old Roman-style replacement cycle did not disappear so much as it slowed to a crawl and moved underground.
Information and finance increasingly took the place that geography once held. Modern power depends on semiconductor fabrication, artificial intelligence, data networks, energy systems, intellectual property, and scientific ecosystems more than it depends on land — which makes modern dominance simultaneously more abstract, more interconnected, and quite possibly more fragile than the old territorial kind. A cyberattack, a debt crisis, a supply-chain disruption, or a single technological leap can now carry empire-scale consequences without a single soldier crossing a border. The old complacency has not vanished, but it wears a different face today: institutional overcomplexity, political polarization, bureaucratic expansion, financialization, declining industrial capacity, demographic stress, technological dependency, and a fraying of social cohesion. The historian Paul Kennedy gave this pattern its modern name — imperial overstretch — the simple, recurring condition in which a great power's global commitments eventually outrun its economic capacity to sustain them.
Perhaps the greatest twentieth-century change of all is this: in earlier eras, a rising civilization could simply and physically replace an older one. Today, the major powers are so economically intertwined and technologically dangerous to one another that no rival can straightforwardly “sack Rome” anymore. Nuclear escalation risks civilization itself; supply chains run through every rival's territory; finance is interconnected past the point of clean separation; advanced societies depend on one another technologically in ways that make destruction self-defeating. Modern competition therefore looks less like conquest and more like pressure, erosion, fragmentation, technological displacement, currency competition, and institutional paralysis. Britain and America may in the end represent a single transitional phase in history — from territorial empire to network civilization — resting on global coordination, shared standards, and legitimacy rather than on garrisons. That dependence on legitimacy is also a vulnerability all its own: if legitimacy erodes, a network civilization can weaken from within long before anything conquers it from without. Rome fell partly because barbarians crossed its borders. A network civilization is more likely to weaken because its own population loses confidence in its institutions, its shared narratives, or its economic arrangements — which leaves the twenty-first century's central, unresolved question hanging in the air: has technological civilization actually escaped the ancient conquest cycle, or merely changed its costume? The next conqueror may not look like Mongol cavalry, Roman legions, or an imperial fleet at all. It may look instead like dominance in artificial intelligence, control of advanced computation, demographic resilience, energy supremacy, or information control — a struggle over who organizes complexity most effectively, rather than who conquers territory most violently.
VII. The New Empires of Asia
“Asia” is not a single actor, so any shift in the world's center of gravity would not resemble the rise of the Mongol Empire, or even the territorial expansion of the British one. It would more likely emerge as a gradual re-centering of the global system's economic, technological, demographic, and industrial weight — a shift in which modern conquest is defined less by occupation than by dependency. A civilization-scale power today increasingly wins when other societies become dependent on its manufacturing, its capital, its markets, its technology, its supply chains, its standards, and, eventually, its cultural and institutional assumptions.
By that measure, Asia has already become the world's industrial core. For roughly two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, Europe and then the United States dominated industrial production; that balance has shifted decisively. East and Southeast Asia now dominate electronics, shipbuilding, batteries, consumer goods, steel, solar technology, semiconductor components, and increasingly advanced robotics, with the modern global economy depending heavily on industrial ecosystems concentrated in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and, increasingly, India. Historically, industrial centrality has a way of eventually translating into geopolitical leverage. Modern hegemonic systems tend to function by becoming indispensable rather than by conquering outright — the British system made nations dependent on British shipping and finance; the American system made nations dependent on the dollar, security guarantees, software, and capital markets. An Asian-centered order could emerge along the same lines if global manufacturing stays concentrated there, if Asian financial systems continue to deepen, and if Asian consumer markets and technology ecosystems become simply unavoidable. Countries rarely resist dependence when it is economically advantageous in the moment; trade patterns become political patterns soon enough.
China is the most obvious candidate for this role, though hardly the only one, and it is attempting something historically unusual: combining ancient civilizational continuity with modern industrial and technological scale. Its strategy often looks less like classical imperialism and more like systemic positioning — through infrastructure, trade, financing, logistics, industrial dominance, and standards-setting, visible in the Belt and Road Initiative, port investments, rare-earth processing, telecommunications infrastructure, electric-vehicle supply chains, and industrial overcapacity deployed to capture global market share. Rather than conquering territory, the goal can be read as becoming structurally unavoidable — something closer to economic gravity than to military empire. Historically, empires spread language, law, currency, religion, and units of measurement; modern powers spread technical standards, software ecosystems, payment systems, telecom protocols, AI infrastructure, and manufacturing norms instead. If Asian firms come to dominate electric vehicles, batteries, telecommunications, AI hardware, robotics, and shipping, global systems may simply organize themselves around Asian standards by default — a soft but genuinely civilizational form of influence. Demographics reinforce the trend: Asia holds the majority of the world's population, an enormous and growing engineering capacity, expanding middle classes, and increasingly sophisticated research systems, with universities and corporations across China, South Korea, Singapore, India, and Japan now major contributors to advanced science and technology. Historically, the civilization that produces the largest pool of technically competent people tends to gain compounding advantages over time.
None of this makes an Asian-centered order inevitable. Asia faces its own serious constraints: demographic aging in China, Japan, and South Korea; debt and property bubbles; energy dependency; water stress; political rigidity; regional rivalries; and a continuing reliance on export markets that a fragmenting world trading system could easily disrupt. Unlike America's rise, Asia's ascent is unfolding inside an already globalized and technologically saturated world, which makes sustained dominance considerably harder to achieve than it was for a nineteenth-century Britain or a twentieth-century United States facing far less competition. The dependence, moreover, cuts in both directions in a way that ancient empires never had to reckon with: the United States depends heavily on Asian manufacturing, and Asia depends just as heavily on American consumers, financial systems, technology, energy security, and the stability of global trade. Ancient empires could destroy rivals and absorb what was left. Modern powers, by contrast, tend to damage themselves badly whenever they damage a rival of this kind — which is why the more plausible future may not be a single Asian empire replacing an American one, but a genuinely multipolar civilization: distributed power centers, competing technological ecosystems, regional financial blocs, and overlapping supply networks, in which America might remain dominant militarily and culturally, China industrially, India demographically, Japan and Korea technologically, and Southeast Asia logistically. The “conquest,” if that word still applies at all, would look like a gradual re-centering rather than an overthrow — and, seen across five centuries rather than five years, perhaps not even a reversal. Before European industrialization, China and India represented enormous shares of world production and Asia's trade networks were already highly sophisticated, while Europe was comparatively peripheral to the world economy. From that longer vantage point, the present moment may mark not the end of a permanent Western supremacy, but the close of a temporary Atlantic-centered chapter within a much longer Eurasian story.
VIII. America's Inflection Point
Which brings the pattern home. Historically, great powers have usually weakened internally before they were displaced from outside — Rome's elites prioritizing court intrigue over frontier defense, the Qing bureaucracy proving unable to adapt quickly enough to industrial rivals, the Abbasid caliphate's military authority slipping to slave-soldier elites while its scholars kept producing extraordinary work. Ibn Khaldun, watching a similar process play out eight centuries ago, would likely recognize the shape of what American institutions are now reporting about themselves.
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide," President John Adams, in a letter to John Taylor.
The evidence is no longer confined to op-ed pages or partisan argument. Freedom House's 2026 report on the United States recorded the sharpest single-year decline in freedom score of any country still rated “free,” driven by escalating dysfunction between the executive branch and Congress, growing pressure on independent media, and the erosion of anticorruption safeguards; media freedom, personal expression, and due process registered the steepest deterioration of any measured category over the past two decades. The V-Dem Institute's Democracy Report 2026 went further still, formally reclassifying the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy and describing a single-year drop in its Liberal Democracy Index ranking — from twentieth in the world to fifty-first — larger than any other country has recorded in the history of V-Dem's data. Both organizations point to the same underlying mechanism: a concentration of power in the executive branch, a legislature increasingly unable or unwilling to exercise oversight, and a citizenry registering rising self-censorship in the face of political and legal pressure. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argued in their study “How Democracies Die” that modern democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic coup; they erode gradually, as the unwritten norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance wear away long before the formal structure of elections and courts follows. Measured against that framework, the story the data now tells reads less like a sudden emergency than like the middle chapters of an old and familiar pattern: a system built under pressure, relaxed by generations of success, and increasingly governed by people more invested in internal advantage than in the shared arrangements that made the whole structure work.
None of this means collapse is imminent, or that decline is destiny. The historians who first charted this cycle — Polybius, Ibn Khaldun, Toynbee, Tainter — were describing tendencies, not laws of physics, and every civilization that has ever faced this juncture had the same option available to it that the United States has now: to notice the pattern and choose differently. What makes the American case distinctive, in fact, is precisely the thing that makes the modern era as a whole so strange by historical standards. Rome's decline ended in barbarian kings ruling from Roman capitals. The Qing dynasty's ended in foreign occupation and revolution. But no rival today can simply cross the Rio Grande or the Pacific and plant a flag, because the mechanisms of twentieth-century power — nuclear deterrence, financial interdependence, technological entanglement — have made that old, clean form of conquest all but obsolete. If American power fades in the twenty-first century, it will not be because Visigoths breached a wall. It will be because Americans themselves, generation by generation, decided that the unglamorous work of shared governance — the compromises, the oversight, the tolerance for opposition, the willingness to lose an argument and stay in the room — was no longer worth the trouble. That is the oldest choice in political history, dressed in new clothes. Every civilization that faced it eventually made one decision or the other. The evidence suggests the United States is, right now, in the middle of making it.
Notes and Sources
Freedom House
Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy. Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, March 2026.
freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world. First cited in ¶33 for the 2026 U.S.
freedom-score decline.
Source for the United States' 2026 freedom score, its decline of three points in a single year, and its fall out of the global top twenty.
Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldūn. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. 3 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967. Originally composed 1377. First mentioned alongside Polybius in ¶32; later used specifically for asabiyyah in ¶48.
Source for the concept of asabiyyah (group cohesion) and the theory that hardy peripheral peoples conquer, then are softened by, decadent urban civilizations — discussed in Part One, Chapter II of the Muqaddimah.
Paul Kennedy
Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987.
Source for the term "imperial overstretch," describing great powers whose global commitments outrun their economic capacity.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. HowDemocracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018.
Source for the argument that modern democracies erode gradually, through the breakdown of unwritten norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance, rather than through sudden coups.
Polybius
Polybius. The Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield, with introduction and notes by Brian McGing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Originally composed c. 150–118 B.C. First invoked in in the opening discussion of historical cycles: "Historians from Polybius to Ibn Khaldun..." (Article ¶32). See TheHistories — Oxford University Press edition information
Source for the analysis of Rome's rise during the Punic Wars and for anacyclosis, Polybius's theory of the cyclical succession of political constitutions, set out in Book 6.
Oswald Spengler
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926–1928. Originally published as Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918–1922.
Source for the description of civilizations as organisms that pass from vitality into rigid old age.
Joseph A. Tainter
Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Source for the argument that the complexity of a society is itself subject to diminishing returns and can become too costly to sustain.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961.
Source for the "challenge and response" framework, under which civilizations rise by successfully answering severe pressures and falter once major challenges subside.
V-Dem Institute
Nord, Marina, David Altman, Tiago Fernandes, Ana Good God, and Staffan I. Lindberg. Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? Gothenburg, Sweden: V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, March 2026. v-dem.net/publications/democracy-reports. First cited in ¶33 for the reclassification of the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy.
Source for the United States' reclassification from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy," its drop from 20th to 51st on the Liberal Democracy Index, and the description of that decline as the largest single-year drop in the history of the V-Dem dataset.
Vegetius (Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus)
Vegetius. Epitome of Military Science. Translated by N. P. Milner. 2nd rev. ed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. Originally composed as De Re Militari, late 4th or early 5th century A.D.
Source for Vegetius's complaint, addressed to a reigning emperor, that Roman military discipline and recruitment had badly declined from the standards of the earlier Republic and Empire.
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