Secret History #20: Thucydides in Our World

If Thucydides come time travel into the 21st century, what would he make of it?

Thucydides would find there are many similarities between our world and that of his during the Peloponnesian War, and he would offer many insights.

Thucydides’ brilliance is in appreciating there are structural forces that direct the course of human events. The cosmos is not a chaotic struggle among the Gods for glory, honor, and sex – it is a predictable and inevitable series of events that can be studied and analyzed. For Thucydides, it was inevitable that a rising Athens would attempt to supplant Sparta, and that Sparta would have to respond. In The Thucydides’ Trap, the Harvard professor Graham Allison predicts that America and China must enter into a Clash of Titans.

Thucydides would remind us that all countries have a national character. Sparta was a conservative oligarchy which confined itself to the Peloponnese. Athens was an aggressive democracy which sought glory and treasure in the Aegean and Mediterranean. Thucydides would appreciate that China’s demographics, economy, and geography make it similar to Sparta, and as such it is only interested in maintaining its sovereignty.

The real Clash of Titans is already happening between America and Russia. As America attempts to isolate it, Russia has no choice but to attempt to break out.

In this conflict, Thucydides would advise extreme caution for the Americans, just as he had advised the Athenians. Sparta was a land power, and it would have been costly for the Athenians to engage on the battlefield – better to hide behind their high walls, and maintain naval supremacy. Russia has complete battlefield dominance in Ukraine, mastering artillery strikes, drone reconnaissance, and rapid infantry advances to sap enemy morale. But just as Sparta dare not besiege Athens the Russians dare not cross the Dneiper.

Thucydides would immediately identify the flippant demagoguery of Trump (and not China or Russia) as the greatest threat to America. Thucydides saw both Cleon and Alcibiades as mercurial demagogues who seduced with false promises of quick glory and easy treasure. Thucydides was of the landed imperial gentry, and had particular disdain for Cleon, who he saw as a social climber. Aristophanes wrote a play ridiculing Cleon as such, but Cleon’s risky military maneuvering captured Spartan hostages, and forced Sparta into suing for peace. The Athenians voted to make Thucydides a general, and rewarded his careful and nuanced strategic planning with an impeachment. Like his contemporary Socrates, Thucydides never thought highly of Athenian democracy, and would have preferred Spartan oligarchy.

Cleon was eventually killed in battle, and that gave rise to an even more dangerous demagogue in Alcibiades. Hailing from one of Athens’ wealthiest families and having been tutored by Socrates, Alcibiades championed the pointless and doomed invasion of Sicily. When his political enemies were about to impeach him, Alcibiades fled to the Spartans before betraying them to re-join the Athenians. He ended his life serving Persia. There is no patriotism among scoundrels.

Even if Trump were to fall, Thucydides would fear that only a more reckless adventurer could take his place. Tucker Carlson is the best positioned to inherit the MAGA movement. At this moment, Marjorie Taylor Greene would defeat JD Vance in a Republican primary.

Thucydides would correctly identify the root of America’s troubles: the hollowing out of the American middle-class. If jobs had not been shipped to China, if the financial industry had not become unfettered from regulation, and if the Democratic Party had not betrayed the working class, then America would not have enabled the rise of China, would not have embarked wars in the Middle East, and would not have a demagogue in office. Thucydides cheered when Athens’ hoplite class (the small landowners) joined the aristocrats to put an end to Athens’ precarious democracy. Here Thucydides would agree with Trump: If America could restore the middle-class, put a moratorium on all immigration, and end its forever wars, America would be great again.

There are limitations to Thucydides’ political imagination. Even though he is a systemic thinker, he still believes competing personalities decide politics, and a people have agency over its future. Athens was a small town – no more than fifty thousand at its height – in which everyone knew each other. Political debates were long and hardy, and attended by tens of thousands who sat all day contemplating the fate and future of Athens.

In America today, political debates are entertainment and distractions. Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is a collection of nuanced political speeches that could end or start wars. In our lifetime, has there ever been a political speech of consequence? Our age of circus politics endows Cleon and Alcibiades with the gravitas and stature of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Thucydides would gasp to learn that private interests control America. The Federal Reserve prints money, the Ivy League selects the elite, and multinationals dictate US foreign policy. Now that transnational capital has bankrupted and emaciated the United States, the parasite searches for a new host.

Americans would happily wave good-bye to their empire. After the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, they never tried to regain their empire, so exhausted and corrupted were they by it. They were dragged into forming the Second Delian League to counter the hegemony of Sparta, and when Thebes displaced Sparta Athens let it splinter apart. When Demosthenes railed against the coming tyranny of Philip of Macedonia, the Athenians yawned, and sent a small volunteer contingent to the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE.

Liberty ends with applause. Empires die with a yawn.