Thucydides' Warning For America

Trump is the antithesis of Reagan -- and he could destroy American power

I recently suggested that Thucydides’ legendary History of the Peloponnesian War contained important lessons for how Canada, Mexico, and other countries should respond to the gangsterism of Donald Trump.

Now I will argue that Thucydides also has a warning for Americans: If Donald Trump isn’t restrained from acting on his worst impulses, his obsession with showing “strength” will diminish and gravely weaken the United States.

To recap: History of the Peloponnesian War is an account of the long, brutal war between the empires of Sparta and Athens by Thucydides, who had been an Athenian general in the war. Athens was primarily a naval power and it used its control of the sea to force the Greek islands to submit to it and pay tribute. During a truce with Sparta, Athens turned on the Greek island of Melos.

Melos was neutral, and no threat to Athens. But the Athenians demanded submission anyway, arguing that if Athens allowed Melos to remain independent, the other islands would see that as a sign of Athenian weakness and would rebel. To show strength, the Athenians felt, they had to break Melos.

The Melians refused to buckle, even when threatened with annihilation. The Athenians attacked. The Melians fought bravely but ultimately forced to surrender. Athens butchered every man of military age and sold all the women and children into slavery.

The Athenians got the demonstration of their power they wanted.

But what then?

Even in that savage age, the brutality of the Athenians shocked and disgusted people throughout the Greek world. Others feared Athens, but they also hated it.

For those who think like Donald Trump does, that’s just fine. What matters is power. Fear brings submission. Those who submitted could seethe all they liked.

But what people like Donald Trump don’t understand is that submission is not the end. This is life. There is no end.

So what comes after submission?

To see the most brutal forms of power politics at work in the modern world, you need to go to one of the nastier prisons.

In such places, there are always predators. Sometimes they go after victims singly. But more often, they will join with other predators, increasing their power and their capacity to victimize. They demand money. Favours. Sex. And the weak must submit. As the Athenians chillingly said to the Melians, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

But after submission, victims think. “Alone, I am weak. But there are other victims.”

They realize that if they band together, they get stronger. Bring enough victims together and they can even keep the predators at bay. Once they gain the upper hand, these defensive alliances may themselves become predatory.

And that’s what happens with clock-like predictability. In fact, if you trace the origins of many of the major gangs on the streets of the United States today, you will eventually get to prisoners banding together to protect themselves.

What I’ve just described in prisons can be seen in the pages of history, over and over again, down through the centuries and millennia. So much of our past consists of little more than “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” — until the weak band together and become the strong.

But that is not the full story of power. Because there is a very different sort of power.

Here is a passage from the end of Ronald Reagan’s farewell address, January 11, 1989:

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the ``shining city upon a hill.'' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

And here is a passage from February, 1941, when Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life, called for “an American century” in which Americans would lead the free world and promote freedom and democracy everywhere:

Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism, we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways – in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world. Americans – Midwestern Americans – are today the least provincial people in the world. They have traveled the most and they know more about the world than the people of any other country. America’s worldwide experience in commerce is also far greater than most of us realize. Most important of all, we have that indefinable, unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige. And unlike the prestige of Rome or Genghis Khan or 19th Century England, American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as in the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole American people. We have lost some of that prestige in the last few years. But most of it is still there.

In 1990, the political scientist Joseph Nye gave a name to the sort of power Henry Luce and Ronald Reagan described. He called it “soft power.”

Soft power is the ability to get others to do what you want to do not with a hard fist but a kind word, a principled appeal, or simply a demonstration of a better way. Soft power is the power of culture, of attraction, of desire and emulation. After American hard power helped defeat Germany in the Second World War, West Germany fully embraced liberal democracy in part because American soft power — think blue jeans and Elvis Presley — made America the exciting land of the future in the minds of young Germans who wanted to dress like Americans, talk like Americans, even think like Americans.

During the Cuban missile crisis, when the US rallied its allies for the confrontation at the United Nations, American ambassadors fanned out across the globe and Dean Acheson went to see the notoriously prickly Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Acheson and an aide hustled into de Gaulle’s office and prepared to show the president the top-secret photos which proved the Soviets had put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. De Gaulle was having none of it. Put those away, he ordered. “The word of the President of the United States is enough for me.” De Gaulle promised to give the United States every bit of support he could muster. After Acheson left, he immediately flew off to press other European leaders.

The United States didn’t threaten or bully Charles de Gaulle. It didn’t offer him economic advantages. For de Gaulle, this wasn’t transactional. He respected and admired the Americans and that was enough.

That is soft power.

America had that soft power in 1962 because Henry Luce had gotten his wish: The United States had fought and won the Second World War with its allies, it had taken the lead in constructing a new international order, and America had maintained its leadership of that order not primarily with hard power — bombs and threats and bribes — but by fostering the most successful array of friendships and alliances in history. Those formal relationships were — and are — built on popular opinion. Aside from those periods when the United States plunged into military follies like Iraq and Vietnam, American culture and the American people have always been, and remain, enormously popular. People love American movies. And music. And Americans. The US Navy recently gave Tom Cruise its highest civilian medal for services rendered, and he deserves it several times over, because one Tom Cruise is worth more to American power than 100,000 cruise missiles.

But all of this is alien to Donald Trump’s thinking.

As I explained in that earlier essay, Trump is a relentlessly zero-sum thinker who sees only winners and losers, the strong and the weak; the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. In 1987, shortly after Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and called on Mr. Gorbachev to tear it down, Donald Trump bought full-page ads in newspapers to denounce Reagan’s whole approach to foreign policy. He said the world “is laughing at us.” In Donald Trump’s mind, power is force and threats of force. It is the strong taking from the weak. To such a man, Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” is, at best, empty words. There are no “friends and allies.” There are only the strong and the weak, those who demand and those who pay and obey.

We label presidents “Republican” and Democrat” but these categories are often arbitrary and misleading. That’s particularly the case with Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan when it comes to foreign policy. Aside from supporting a strong military, Donald Trump is the antithesis of Ronald Reagan.

“Donald Trump is the first president since Roosevelt, maybe for a long time before that, who has no sense of the United States as owing anything to the rest of the planet. No sense of it being an example, no sense of it being something that can be admired,” noted Atlantic writer and former White House speech writer David Frum in a recent interview. “He wants to dominate through force and power.”

That method can work. Look at poor Melos. The Melians were beaten, slaughtered, sold into slavery. If you have enough power, you can always compel submission.

But what then? The weak will do what victimized prisoners do.

Athens savaged Melos and it was strong and feared — and hated — for many years. When Athens finally suffered setbacks in its war — as all powers will, no matter how great their weapons and soldiers — the brutalized Greek islands rebelled. And Sparta pressed, backed by Persia.

The arrogant Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War. Athens was subjugated by Sparta, and even after it liberated itself, its power was broken. Athens never returned to its former glory.

Nor did the rest of the Greek world. Once the pinnacle of civilization, Greece slowly faded from history.

“The problem is no one — no one — is that powerful [that they can] dominate the whole world,” noted David Frum. “The United States has been strong because it is trusted. The United States is strong because it has friends. If it becomes just another big empire, like China, like India, like the way Russia was before Putin wrecked the Ukraine war, people may fear you, but they won't respect you."

There isn’t enough hard power in the world to fill the void when soft power evaporates.

A US WWII propaganda poster. The theme of America leading a grand alliance of friends and allies — the “United Nations” — was a staple of the war years.

The American economy became the world’s largest at the end of the 19th century. It could have taken a leading role in international affairs in 1918 but it refused, so it wasn’t until 1945 that American international power matched its economic might.

Now consider that Britain’s international dominance lasted roughly from the end of Napoleon to the end of the Kaiser. That’s one century. Whether we measure by economic or political dominance, American leadership is getting long in the tooth. And yet, America remains robust economically, while its friendships and alliances are vigorous all these decades later.

But here comes Donald Trump, an American president who has only praise for dictators and insults for America’s friends. An American president who, before he even takes office, threatens Mexico, Panama, Denmark, and Canada. An American president who thinks and acts like the Athenians who led Athens to ruin.

The United States has plenty of power to throw around, so Trump can bluster and bully and collect tribute. But every time he does, a little of the respect and affection foreigners feel for American will be replaced by fear. And America will become a little weaker. If Trump continues — if wiser men and women cannot restrain him — the process will accelerate. The bullied will gradually withdraw from America, while speaking quietly with others, making new arrangements.

I find it hard to imagine that one man, let alone such a manifestly incompetent manager, could successfully destroy the international institutions and friendships America built over generations. But if Trump is not restrained, and other Americans emulate Trump’s thinking, and Trump is succeeded by other presidents who share his views but not his incompetence — the most important “if” — that may be enough.

If all that should come to pass, Donald Trump will enjoy seeing the weak crawling before him like supplicants before a Russian czar, and listening to fools hailing his “strength,” and gorging himself on corruption like his role model in the Kremlin. But time will grind on and Trump will go, eventually, one way or the other.

What will remain is an America unrecognizable to those of us who knew and respected the Pax Americana.

That America will be weakened and diminished. And with it, the world.