What Trump can Learn from Thucydides

Many have cited Thucydides statement “the strong do as they will, the weak do as they must” to explain Trump’s approach to the world. But that missed the great Greek historian’s real point.

I participated in a panel discussion at the Delphi Econcomi this weekend on what happens when the United States abandons the global leadership role it so successfully played for over 80 years. I was joined by my good friend and frequent co-author Jim Lindsay and New Democracy MP Dimitris Kairidis. The entire conversation is worth watching.

But there was one particular intervention by Kairidis, who is also a professor of international relations, that deserves particular attention. You can watch his comment here (starts at 22:19).

Kairidis went back to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War to elucidate what is going on today. And that history of 2500 years ago is indeed insightful. Karidis reminds us that the usual way the history is understood—that the war was caused by Athens’ fear of Sparta’s rising power—is how most people remember the history. Indeed, the Harvard scholar Graham Allison has coined the idea of the “Thucydides trap” to examine the prospect of war between China and the United States.

But Karidis rightly argued that this misunderstands Thucydides’s history. For Athens didn’t lose the war against Sparta because Sparta had become a superior power. Athens lost the war, Thucydides argued,

because of the degradation of its polity, the decline of its democracy and the republic and its ethos, which led to the demagogues and all the foreign follies, including the Sicilian campaign.

And this history, Karidis maintained, is relevant today. For the United States is today still the most powerful country. The biggest threat it faces is not a rising China, however. It is “the degradation of our own polity and of our own alliances” that constitutes the greatest threat today.

I couldn’t agree more. Athenians believed, as Thucydides recounts, that “the strong do as they will and the weak do as they must.” Trump has taken this Athenian hubris and made it his own—by claiming America will “get” Greenlands, “take” the Panama Canal, and make Canada its “51st state.” But it is the rot of America’s polity—of the unbridled exercise of executive power, the absorption of legislative power as its own, and the ignoring of judicial power—that will ultimately undo America unless check and balances are restored and hubris abandoned.

Thucydides’s lesson is clear: Trump and his supporters ignore history at their—and our—peril.