Yet we look back and get the impression that the outcome of the fight between those two cities was never in doubt.
Perhaps it is just because our sources are all pro-roman and the romans liked to believe they werre destined to win?
I think that that is spot on, really.
Uttica defected in the Third Punic War, if I'm not mistaken. The writing was on the wall then, though.
Yes, the Hannibalic War and the Third Punic War were different things.
Historians have claimed that. Marhabal allegedly believed that. However, given the Roman attitude for the rest of the war, I still have trouble believing it. For starters, even they agreed it required a march on Rome. If he did that, it would have become apparent he lacked siege equipment, which would have required building some. Given the time for that, would Rome still be in a state of panic?
The history of the Second Punic War shows such a determined resolve that my thought is they'd fight to the bitter end. When Hannibal crossed the Alps, Scipio sent his army to Spain. When Hannibal ravaged southern Italy, they told him they would not negotiate with an army on Italian soil and then sent an army to Illyria. Even in Rome's darkest days, they expanded their territorial acquisitions. I still don't think even Cannae would have been enough regardless of what happened immediately after it.
Once Hannibal had an army with siege equipment, he could have marched on Rome,
taken it, and then he would've been master of Italy regardless of the Roman aristocracy's "resolve".
Rome wasn't run by imperialist fools. They understood that Barka family had build a personal empire in Spain and that in order to crush Carthage they needed to conquer or paralyse their dependent territories. Same could be said about fighting Macedon - Rome simply always had strength to sufficiently defend itself on all fronts. "Divide and rule", "always block, conquer only when you can" sort of policy.
This seems almost like an ethic of success sort of thing. Rome always won in the end, therefore the Romans always picked reasonable targets and stayed relatively limited in their short-term ambitions. But that only makes sense if the outcome of all Rome's wars was decided from the outset.
Yet this is not all that clear. The Hannibalic War, for instance, was an immense strain on Rome's resources, especially when considered in conjunction with the other conflicts the Romans were fighting at the same time in Greece and northern Italy. Even in that war, Rome did not face the full measure of some of its opponents' strength, and got lucky in other ways (e.g. the Metaurus campaign, when Hannibal failed to act, or the bad weather that kept Philippos V's lemboi fleet in port). It does not seem particularly unreasonable to say that Rome could well have lost that war, although what a "loss" would entail would obviously have to remain up in the air.
And then, if one wants an even more blatant example of Roman military overreach, look at the scenario a decade after Zama. Roman control of formerly Qarthadastei Iberia was collapsing, the Romans were facing the most serious Celtic threat in northern Italy since Telamon, and then the Romans picked a fight with Antiochos III in Greece for essentially no reason at all. And
then the Romans expanded
that war by pursuing Antiochos into Asia, because...well, it's hard to explain that any way
other than an almost Napoleonic imperialistic overreach. Rome was badly suffering from over a generation of constant, large-scale, high-stakes warfare - ever since the Italian crisis of the 220s, really - and Roman manpower was at a nadir. The Romans had to bully recently insurrectionist southern Italy into supplying the troops for their Greco-Asian expedition. John Grainger has made a very persuasive argument that this was, effectively, Rome's last real army, and that if it had been destroyed at Magnesia the Romans very well might have faced a failure cascade throughout their entire empire. But the Romans got lucky, Antiochos uncharacteristically led his cavalry off the field instead of rolling up the Roman-Pergamene forces from the rear, and they were able to keep their army intact.
I just can't view that as evidence that Rome "wasn't run by imperialist fools" and "always had strength to sufficiently defend itself". It's true that republican Rome's great advantage was in its nearly limitless manpower reserves, and the dispensability of that manpower, compared to the forces of most of its opponents. But even so, Rome still at times was on the knife's edge of running out of that manpower due to the infinite wars in which the republic involved itself. Rome faced those problems, and pulled through out of a combination of luck, the mistakes of its enemies, and the individual successes of Roman officers and Roman armies.