Not to nerd out too much, but this is HN so it's probably OK. The Pax Romana/Mongolica concepts have wide support in academia. Unified government under despotic colonial powers was indeed the source of the immense social progress, and we simply have to treat with that. In fact, the rapid expansion of cross-eurasian trade under Mongol rule is arguably the proximate cause of the European renaissance, concentrating wealth in Italian trade centers designed to exploit the availability of those goods.

As always, wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica

Does that make them good people or me a Yuan dynasty apologist? No. But it makes the world complicated and not well suited to the kind of quips that you're flinging at Cheney.

Again, we could do a lot worse. We may already have.