Coffee and the Rise and Fall of Empire:
An Incontrovertibly Perky Theory
By Joseph Joffe

MUNICHThe summer of '97 in America: Dairy Queen and A&W
root beer floats are but faint memories, like sock hops and 30cent gas.
It's frappucino now. And macchiato. And Starbucks.

And, perhaps, the end of the American empire.
The handwriting was on the wall when the McDonald's in
Boston's Logan airport began serving espresso to the Big Maa crowd.
You can now get a double at the Pit Stop Espresso in Palmer, Alaska.
There are 1,300 Starbucks outlets in North America, and each week,
5 million people come for a mocha or a latte.
What handwriting? And why the Gibbonesque ruminations
about the rise and decline of nations?
The connection between coffee and clout first thrust itself on
this author in Moscow in 1978, while the "Evil Empire" was still on a
roll. The Brezhnevites had just unleashed a Europewide propaganda
campaign against America's "neutron bomb."
On an official visit with a delegatsiya, I complained bitterly to
my KGB handler about the nasty swill the Rossiya Hotel was serving up
as "coffee."
Trying to humor me, he offered KGB jollity: "What do Russian
coffee and the neutron bomb have in common?" I was flummoxed.
"Both kill people and leave buildings intact. And what is the difference?
You can protest the neutron bomb but not Russian coffee!"
At that point, the germ of a theory began to bud in my
caffeinedepleted brain. It is destined to dethrone every theory about
the rise and fall of the great powers developed in the last four
centuries from Machiavelli via Gibbon and Spengler to Lenin and Paul
Kennedy.
Bad coffee equals expansionism, imperialism and war; good
coffee drips with civility, pacifism and lassitude. That is the long and
the short of it.
Here I was in the heart of the Soviet empire, and not a single
Melitta filter in sight. Not even one of those lowly percolators.
Americans used to bubble their beans between the conquest of the
West and the advent of the Melior. Just toxic mud and tepid water.
But what an empire! The Soviets had more nukes and. troops
than the Americans. They were masterminding wars throughout Africa.
They were collecting Third World pawns by the bushel. Add they were
about to invade Afghanistan.

Was it communism or coffee that drove them? A systematic
survey of world history quickly turned the germ into a fully blown and,
I might add, incontrovertible theory.
Who had ruled the world for 400 years? Britain. What had
distinguished Albion from the rest? The Magna Carta? The Royal
Navy? Big Ben? No, horrible coffee all the way to victoEsr in the
Falkland war of 1982.
What about the United States? The age of American expansion
from the Louisiana Purchase to Vietnam was marked by the ubiquitous
coffeepot where the coarseground meal was first scalded and then left
on the fire to thicken into an acid brew just right for tanning buffalo
hides.
Or take Gerrnany. During the height ofGerman expansionism
between the 1890s and the 1940s, Germans distinguished between
"Kaffee" and "Bohnenkaffee" (literally: bean coffee). The masses drank
the former, a mix of burnt barley and chicory. Only the very rich could
afford the real stuff. And look where it got themall the way to
Moscow.
Bad coffee, then, is the milk of warriors. But any decent theory
must also work in reverse, and hence good coffee should reduce the
martial passions along with a nation's military skills. The Arabs are the
best case in point. When was Arab power done in for good? When
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain completed the reconquista by driving
the Moors from Granada, their last stronghold on Iberian soil, in 1492.
It so happens that qahwa came into use throughout the Arab
Islamic world in the midlSth century. That rang the death knell for the
two great Islamic empires, the Ottoman one on the northern and the
Arab one on the southern rim of the Mediterranean.
The Turks made one more try, which brought them to Senta,
southeast of Vienna. There they were stopped in 1697, and ever since
neither Turks nor Arabs have won any significant battle. Why not? As
is well known, Arab or Turkish coffee, especially when laced with
cardamom, is among the best in the world.

The Ottomans had their bittersweet revenge, though.
Withdrawing from Vienna, they left their coffee sacks behind. The
Austrians took to mocha with more passion than young Wolfgang
Amadeus to the violin.
Soon Vienna was replete with coffeehouses, whence a great
culture grew, from Strauss to Musil and Freud. But the Hapsburg
empire was doomed, reduced to a hasbeen by the coffeesnubbing
Prussians in the l9th.
So far, we have established that bad coffee makes for virility
and expansionism while the art of the demitasse favors bad generals and
the gentler pursuits of life. To deflate all naysayers, we must show that
the theory works not just in a static but also in a dynamic way.
Accordingly, cultures, when moving, say, from instant to
mocha java, should turn pacific at the first hiss of an espresso machine.
This is precisely what happened to Germany, the most
aggressive nation in this century. But since 1945, hobnails have been
strictly verboten, and Germans have become as aggressive as sloths.
Go to Moscow today and you'll probably find a latte stand
right next to Lenin's tomb. But the heirs of Marshal Zhukov can no
longer beat a bunch of ragtag Chechens.
So what about America? I fear the worst. Yes, the United
States still has the most sophisticated military machine in the world,
and every once in a while it does slug it out with the Saddams and the
Karadzics. But look at the downside. In 1992, Starbucks operated a
paltry 162 hangouts nationwide. Just in the first half of 1997, it has
opened 212 new stores, aiming for a total of 2,000 by millennium's
end.
No good can come of this. The age of Arnerican greatness will
come to an end in an ocean of hazelnut and amaretto if Starbucks and
epigones expand unchecked. There is a reason why the great empires of
yore have gone under when confronted with a Melior full of freshly
brewed Kenyan Blue. Either you tend to your goldplated Gaggia or to
your F 16. You don't fight with a frappucino in hand.

All is not lost yet, America. Just dig out that old percolator.
Put in some coarseground Maxwell. Scorch and burn for an hour or so
until the brackish liquid smells like your very own toxic dump. Shudder
and gulp.
This is the kind of stuff that made Clint Eastwood's day and
took Douglas MacArthur all the way to the Yalu River.

The writer is editorial page editor and columnist of
Suddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich newspaper. He contributed this
comment to The New York Times.