In The Cosmopolitan Illusion, Lee Harris weighs patriotism against cosmopolitanism. In the process, he describes how the Roman system transcended family or clan:
Families and kin can clearly work well together, but the source of their cohesion is simultaneously the source of their weakness: Either one is a member of the family or the tribe or else one is not. If not, you never will be, and you know it. But this law does not apply to societies in which the primary unit is a group able to work together — a team, and not the family. This, according to Livy’s account, is how we are to understand the secret of Rome’s initial rise to greatness: It was made up of people who could work together precisely because family could not and did not matter to them. This meant that they were free to organize and cooperate without the structural tensions that arise when there are a number of different families, each vying for positions of prestige, prominence, and power, and leading in their contentious train all sorts of juvenile rabble-rousers.
Comparing America to Rome and Iraq to Scythia is left as an exercise for the reader.