The Ukrainian peace process, if it deserves such a name, calls to mind the Melian Dialogues.
Melos was a free state, an island in the Cyclades, that had remained neutral in the war between the Athenian empire and Sparta.
In 416 BC the Athenian navy landed troops on the island and sent a delegation to demand that the Melians surrender and become tributary colonies of their empire.
If they failed to surrender, they would be destroyed and enslaved.
Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian wars, created a version of the dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians, derived from what eyewitnesses told him, or like the great Greek tragedians of his era, on what he imagined must have happened when justice met brute force.
The Melians protested that the military force arrayed against them left them a choice between dishonorable surrender or slavery and annihilation.
They argued that since the Athenian empire might be in danger from superior force one day, the Athenians should respect the Melian’s ‘privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right.’
In words that have been famous ever since, the Athenian general replied: ‘
you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
When the Melians refused to surrender, the Athenians crushed them.
As Thucydides tersely records his side “put to death all the grown men whom they took and sold the women and children for slaves and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.”
Ever since 416 BC, the Melian dialogue has defined how the West understands strength in its relation to justice in international relations.
After two catastrophic wars in Europe in the 20
th century, the victors crafted a UN Charter whose purpose was to equalize the power of the weak and strong states, by anchoring the sovereign equality of each and the inviolability of their borders in international law.
The idea was to give what the Melians had called the principles of ‘fair and right’ a chance against the brute force of military power.
The history of international relations since 1945 can be told as a story of the inconstant, uneven battle between the two principals at stake in those dialogues.
As the strongest nation to come out of World War II, America always had a predilection for the brutal realism incarnated on the Athenian side.
At Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt acceded to Stalin’s enslavement of Eastern Europe.
Yet the Melian claim did exert an influence in the post war American battle with Communism.
The Truman doctrine committed America in 1947 to defend free peoples against communist subversion.
In part this was a defense of American interests, in part a commitment to ‘the fair and the right.’
In Vietnam, three Presidents, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, reluctantly committed themselves to defend the Truman doctrine,
while Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, cut the democratic South Vietnamese loose in 1972, concluding that the strength of the North Vietnamese side couldn’t be resisted any longer.
Donald Trump aspires to the brutal realism of Nixon and Kissinger and will cut Ukraine loose if he can, but he lacks the geopolitical persistence of the former or the cunning diplomatic mastery of the latter.
His preference is for the performance, rather than the substance of power, and the interests he serves are strictly his own, not those of the people who elected him, the state he serves or the institutions he has sworn to protect.
It is possible that the only motive he has for engaging in the peace process at all is to ensure that his predecessors take the blame for American involvement in the war, and that Ukraine’s collapse doesn’t happen on his watch and is laid at his door.
He worships strength because as Thucydides said, the strong can do what they can, and he despises weakness because the weak do what they must.
Hence his worship of Putin, hence his consistent disparagement of Zelensky who “doesn’t hold the cards.”
The idea that there is ‘fair and right’ on one side, and violence and injustice on the other, is, in his view, strictly for simpletons.
Thucydides and his dialogue have remained the cornerstone of ‘realist’ foreign policy in every State Department and Chancery in the world for centuries.
The lessons that are usually drawn from it are that principles of ‘fair and right’ matter for little in international relations.
What counts is the relative disposition of military power between competitors in the international system.
When Trump tells Zelensky he doesn’t have the cards, he is simply repeating this age-old realist conviction.
When he fawns upon dictators and his acolyte, JD Vance, applauds authoritarians in Europe, while disparaging democrats, they are making their worship of power the sole basis of US foreign policy.
But is brutal realism the right lesson to be drawn from the Melian dialogue?
Is force the only power that counts in relation between states?
Zelensky and the Ukrainians have withstood the Russians for three years precisely because ‘what is fair and right’ is without question on their side.
A nation of one hundred and seventy million people, armed with nuclear weapons, and the surveillance and espionage capacities of an authoritarian state has been fought to a stand-still by a nation a third its size.
It has called on American and European support, to be sure, but Ukraine’s greatest asset has been its own furious will to resist, derived from an equally furious desire to be free.
Like the Finns in 1940, a country with a will to resist has shown it can deploy better organization, generalship, closer knowledge of terrain, stronger capacity to improvise and master new technology than the nominally stronger side.
What’s the lesson?
Who is strong and who is weak—the criteria of the Melian dialogue—do not depend solely on weapons counts, on rows of tanks, on population size.
They depend on will, bloody determination, fierce desire for freedom, and the capacity to draw support because of the moral power of their case.
Trump understands none of this and so has fallen prey to what might be called the realism of fools.
A further example of the realism of fools is the ‘Thucydides trap’ idea, coined by my former colleague, Graham Allison, according to which the US is ‘destined’ for conflict with a rising power like China, just as Athens was drawn into conflict with Sparta.
What’s foolish here is the language of inevitability, the overconfident belief that conflict between established powers and rising ones is ineluctable, and the neglect of what great power realism always neglects: human judgement, will-power, discernment, virtue and the power of principle.
Realism also makes the mistake of thinking strength is a solid and unchanging quality in a nation.
But strength always looks invincible until it collapses.
When I was in Moscow in 1983, as part of an official delegation, we met Soviet officials who exuded blithe confidence that their empire would endure forever.
Six years later, when its leader refused to send the tanks into Eastern Europe once again, judging that he could not handle the ensuing bloodshed, the Soviet Empire unraveled, and a young KGB officer in Dresden found himself frantically burning paper in the backyard of his station house, wondering how the mighty Soviet Union had so suddenly collapsed.
This may be the trauma that drives Putin onwards in the insensate and bloody drive to recreate Russia’s vanished empire, but if it is, it tells you that he knows, better than most, just how tenuous, how quickly lost, the power of the strong can be.
If Putin needed further instruction on the pathos of power, Thucydides’ career would offer a cautionary example.
He died in 411 BC, his masterpiece unfinished, but the empire he served, the one that only a decade had before had vaunted its unchallengeable strength to the Melians, went down to defeat at the hands of Sparta in 404 BC and soon its glories, its temples, its monuments, its hoplite power, its triremes, were just a memory.
Originally Posted by isnogood
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