The Strong Do What They Can and Suffer What They Must | Jonathan Kirshner

In Episode 488 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-strong-do-what-they-can-and-su%EF%AC%80er-what-they-must-jonathan-kirshner of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with political scientist Jonathan Kirshner about the origins of the Peloponnesian War, the enduring misreading of Thucydides, and what the arc of the Athenian empire on the eve of the Sicilian expedition reveals about the trajectory of American power in the twenty-first century. The first half traces the war's origins alongside Kirshner's central argument: that one of Thucydides' most frequently quoted passages has been enlisted to justify a worldview directly at odds with the lesson he meant to impart—that great powers are undone less by their rivals than by their own restlessness and hubris, and that prudence, not the gratuitous use of force, is the true mark of a durable empire. America's two long wars, the global financial crisis, and its latest campaign against Iran emerge as expressions, each in their own way, of an imperial hyperpower operating without constraint and with little consideration for the national interest. The second half turns to the hollowing out of American domestic institutions and the growth of the unitary executive, the fate of the alliance networks and international institutions that have underwritten American imperial influence since the Second World War, and the sobering possibility that the forces shaping the trajectory of American empire reside less in any single administration than in the society that has produced it. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 07/08/2026

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Jonathan Kirshner, professor of political science and international studies at Boston College and of political economy at Cornell University. He is also the author of several books, including Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics. Recently authored an essay in Foreign Affairs in which he compares the nature of American power in the 21st century to that of the Athenian Empire on the eve of the Sicilian

• 0:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Expedition in the last decade of the Peloponnesian War. Jonathan and I spent the first half of our conversation today tracing the war's origins alongside his main argument that one of Thucydides' most frequently quoted passages has been used to justify a political worldview that stands in direct opposition to the lesson he intended for us to learn: that great powers are undone less by their rivals than by their own restlessness and hubris, and that prudence, rather than gratuitous use of force, is the true mark of a durable empire. America's two long wars, the global financial crisis and its latest campaign against Iran, are all, in their own ways, expressions of an imperial power operating without constraint

• 1:28Demetri Kofinas?

  and with little consideration for the national interest. The hollowing out of American domestic institutions and the growth of the unitary executive, the fate of America's alliance networks and international institutions that have underwritten its imperial influence since the Second World War, and the sobering possibility that the forces shaping the trajectory of American empire reside less in any single administration than in the society that produced it are all themes we grapple with in the second half of this episode. If you want access to the transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which includes summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to our Super Nerd tier at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you want to

• 2:10Demetri Kofinas?

  join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly inspiring, educational, and timely conversation with my guest, Jonathan Kirshner. Jonathan Kirshner, welcome back to Hidden Forces. Always a pleasure to be here.

• 2:55Demetri Kofinas?

  You are one of my favorite recurring guests. Well, I wouldn't have called you a recurring guest, actually, until today. You were on the podcast some years ago, and then you recently made an appearance in an episode of The Hundred Year Pivot that I co-host with Grant Williams. And you're back. You're back in force after having published an article recently in Foreign Affairs titled "The Strong Do What They Can and Suffer What They Must", which is a slightly altered quote pulled from the Melian Dialogue within Richard Crowley's translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, which I understand you also teach a course at university. And even that translation, though, is subject to interpretation, specifically the words "strong" and "suffer" carry more subjective weight in Crowley's translation than may have been intended, but you're the expert, so maybe you'll have

• 3:40Demetri Kofinas?

  a chance to tell us. What inspired you to construct a critique of American foreign policy by leaning On the seemingly inconsequential genocide of a few thousand Aegean islanders in classical Greece.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Well, the question is, why did Thucydides dwell on that? Because, as you said, in the course of this vast war, it is a rather inconsequential event. And yet, he stops the action and invents this dialogue. And so it was obviously very important to Thucydides. So we can talk a lot about why it was important to Thucydides. But I want to get back to your larger question about motivations. I'm really enchanted with Thucydides' work, The Peloponnesian War. Although I do read it in English and I'm dependent upon translations and commentaries, of which I have read many, but I am not a classicist. I'm a student of international relations. But in my discipline of international relations, most people and most students, although there are very important exceptions, are what I call revolving door Thucydidesans,

• 4:39Speaker 01

  which means they come in with a sentence that says, "The war was caused by the rise of Athenian power and the fear it invoked in Sparta." And then they skip ahead to the Peloponnesian War, to the Melian Dialogue, in which they say, "The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must," 16 years later. And both of those are radically decontextualized. Graham Allison made a book about the so-called Thucydides' trap that drew on that first sentence. And most students of international relations in their intro courses are taught that the Melian Dialogue actually shows us these things. And both of those are based on shallow, decontextualized readings of this vast and brilliant work. So my motivation to get into Thucydides was to do that.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  And nowadays, in the US at least, you have many policymakers who are almost strutting about, saying, "Yeah, man, this is how the world works. Thucydides told us this." I mean, they rarely say Thucydides. And so I felt strongly motivated to say, "Well, actually, that was not what Thucydides was trying to teach us by reporting or inventing this conversation."

• 5:46Demetri Kofinas?

  So is that the preconception that most of your students come into the course with? And do they get it from Allison's work and his book, Destined for War?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  So this predates Allison's book.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And I'm going to be a little impolite and say it's not a very good book, but it isn't. And it really does rest on the fact that professors, they can only do so much. I mean, most professors in IR classes don't even bother with Thucydides. But when they do, it's to grab those two sentences. It's to say, look, look at this. Thucydides could tell 2,500 years ago that changes to the balance of power could cause war, which is not a bad observation to make, but it is really kind of ripped out of its historical context and slapped down, still bleeding, as Stanley Hoffmann once said, into settings where it might not be appropriate. And similarly, the Millian Dialogue, when I was undergraduate, I had a wonderful professor,

• 6:38Speaker 01

  but I do remember being taught that this was Thucydides' lesson with the Millian Dialogue, that this is what the world is like, and that the strong will do what they will, and the weak will suffer what they must, and that appeals to norms and legitimacy and morality. You know, what you end up when you try to do that is getting massacred. But again, that was not Thucydides' intention with that dialogue, at least in the opinion of the overwhelming majority of people who've devoted their lives to studying this book.

• 7:08Demetri Kofinas?

  So we'll have a chance to talk about the Millian Dialogue in more detail, as well as Graham Allison's political theory and why the lessons he draws from the war may not be the correct ones, in addition to them being a historical, since, counterintuitively, it was Athens that seemed to be the more reasonable comparison to the US, both because of the nature of its naval empire and the sources of its commercial power than was continental Sparta. But why don't we start with a brief summary of the Peloponnesian War, since we've already established that many in the audience may already be coming to this conversation with some dubious preconceptions about it. When was it fought, over what duration, who were the principal counterparties, et cetera?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  So in broad brush, there was the setting of ancient Greece, and there were two dominant cities, although there were other powers, city powers involved at the time. But Athens and Sparta were recognized as perhaps the two predominant cities, and they had been allies during the earlier Persian wars. And they were rivals, and that rivalry over time developed into this war for lots and lots of proximate reasons. But Thucydides insists that the underlying reason was that Athens was growing stronger and stronger, and that the Spartans were indeed alarmed by this. We can unpack that a lot if you like. And the story, which is told with brilliant narrative nonfiction,

• 8:34Speaker 01

  is the story of the initial confrontation between Athens and Sparta. They talk about whether or not they should find a compromise. They decide, nah, we both prefer war to compromise. And that war unfolds in three phases. There's a 10-year war that ends with sort of an inconclusive peace that perhaps leans in Athens' favor. And then a seven-year interregnum of kind of jockeying for position and scattered fighting. And then the war resumes, and it continues for 10 more years, and ends in Athens' unconditional surrender at the hands of Sparta and its allies. Now, Thucydides had the opportunity to write about this war because he was an Athenian general.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And early on in the war, he was in charge of some, an operation that failed. And so he was punished for it. They did that back in the day, often executing generals. But this wasn't really the world's largest failure. So he was just exiled for 10 years. And he was, although we don't know him, apparently a remarkable man. And with time on his hands, he decided he would devote himself to studying and documenting and writing about this war, which he believed would be of epochal importance. And he wrote a masterpiece of a book talking about that war. And as his first important English language translator, Thomas Hobbes, explained, even though he tells the story and adjusts the facts sort of a way,

• 10:00Speaker 01

  by narrative techniques, he sees the work with lessons and ideas that he wants to impart to the readers, which he did say he wanted to provide as a possession for all time.

• 10:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's actually dig into the history of this period a bit, since I think it will be educational for the audience, of course, and for me, to probe your mind on it. Before the outbreak of what we think of as the Peloponnesian War around 431 B.C., there were a series of clashes between Athens and Sparta's allies, Corinth chief among them, and that period represented the breakdown of what was referred to as the Thirty Years' Peace, which lasted for something like 10 years. And it was negotiated after the end of what some scholars refer to now as the First Peloponnesian War, which was preceded by two Persian invasions of Greece, the first by King Darius around 490 B.C., I think, and

• 10:53Demetri Kofinas?

  then the second 10 years later by his son Xerxes, who more people might be familiar with because of the popular movie 300 and its depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae, as well as the Battle of Salamis, in which the Athenians used a fleet of triremes that I believe were commissioned by Themistocles, who was another famous politician, was he not, who was ostracized from Athens, if I remember correctly?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. I will have to take your word for it. I am like Thucydides' work memorized. My Greek history outside of that is thinner. And I should also add, I'm a kid from New York, and so I will mispronounce a thousand Greek names.

• 11:31Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I'm kind of torn between whether I want to use the English pronunciation or the Greek pronunciation at various times, which would probably annoy people. But so, what I think is relevant here is to understand the state of insecurity that the Greek world existed in during the period of the Persian invasions, and how that was foundational to informing the landscape that developed after which, which eventually led to the Persian War and the accumulation of power in Athens. Can you lay that out for us?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Well, as I understand it, again, my focus is more on the war that Thucydides spent most of his time discussing, is that Athens and Sparta were important allies during this Persian War, and that Athens was extremely important in bringing about the victory of the Greek city-states over this invasion, and that after the war ended, as international relations scholars will tell us, immediately new political conflicts emerged. Athens initially headed something called the Delian League, which was a loosely Affiliated set of alliances and Sparta had the area that it dominated politically. But Athens' Delian League slowly morphed into what became the Athenian Empire. And it was growing and growing.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And over time, it came Athens, that is, started to irritate some of Sparta's most important allies, in particular, the Corinthians. And so even though Thucydides says, and says repeatedly, and there's no doubt that he believed this, that it was the rise of Athenian power that invoked fear in Sparta and led them to commence the war. Really, I'm going to finger the Corinthians here. I mean, they're annoyed by Athens was pushing them around. And they storm over to Sparta and they say, listen, you guys are sitting there passively, doing nothing. And if you don't do something, we're out of here, man. And it's a beautiful debate that takes place in Sparta. They have some Athenians wander by and make a few comments.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And the Spartans eventually vote for war. But even though Thucydides' argument is unambiguous, Thucydides' narrative really doesn't show me a scared Sparta. It shows me a Sparta that had to go to war because otherwise its alliance system would have unraveled, and that was unacceptable. So I view the Corinthians as actually the people who caused the, at least the war in its proximate sense. I guess a true Thucydides would argue that something else would have come along eventually, given these changes in the underlying power dynamics. But that's where you get the underlying war, the Spartans vote for war. And back in Athens, Pericles rallies a reluctant Athenian public

• 14:10Speaker 01

  to follow his advice, reject negotiation and commence war with Sparta, which is one of the many things, again, not to pound on this too much, that Allison's account gets exactly wrong.

• 14:22Demetri Kofinas?

  So just a quick note for listeners, Jonathan, and then a question. I think you actually highlight this also in your article, which is that Thucydides goes to great lengths to let his readers know that he's doing his best to be as objective as he can. But in certain cases, he puts into dialogue what, in his opinion, was demanded of the participants by those occasions, of which the Meleon Dialogue that we're going to be speaking about appears to be one. My question has to do with military competency. So both Sparta and Athens were experienced in hoplite warfare, but it was the Spartans who were famous for their skill in land-based battles. And the Athenians were, of course, famous for their navies and their naval power. What's important for us to understand militarily about these two city-states?

• 15:04Demetri Kofinas?

  And how did this influence the nature of their societies and their political systems?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Well, Athens was the masters of the sea. This was their specialization, and it was a trading city. And they had the largest navy, but also they had easily the most skilled navy. And so they were, they had no peer with regard to a naval challenger. And again, Sparta was more dominant on the land. I'm not an expert in military strategy, so I cannot get into the weeds of the specifics of how they fought. But this was an odd confrontation, and it led to their strategies. When the war started, Sparta wanted to draw out Athens into large land battles. And Athens cleverly said, "No, I don't think that's a good idea for us." And they retreated behind their city walls and tried a strategy of waiting Sparta out

• 15:52Speaker 01

  while annoying them with kind of naval raiding missions along the coastline and things like that. This was Pericles' original strategy. It was unpopular among many Greeks because, you know, the Spartans were having their way on land and laying waste to various territories, and the people were getting agitated. And Pericles would not budge on this strategy. And in fact, there's one amusing anecdote in the book where they want to hold a meeting so they can yell at him, and he kind of leaves town and says, "Yeah, we're not going to have a meeting today", and lets the public cool off. So it was an interesting confrontation between two very different styles of power and also two very different polities. Athens, for its time, you know, with limitations, was a democracy.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And the Sparta was, well, you know, they had a oligarchic leadership that wasn't...

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Singular dictatorship, but you know, they were, as the word might say, more Spartan in their approach to things.

• 16:49Demetri Kofinas?

  So were either of these city-states more disliked than the other? And if so, was it Sparta or was it Athens, would you say?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Well, this is something that Thucydides wants to teach us, which is that one of the consequences of the rise of Athenian power was that Athens got a little arrogant and started kicking people around. And he has this beautiful sentence that at the start of the war, men's feelings inclined towards Sparta. And again, that was because of the way in which Athens had been comporting itself for the past few decades. And so this is a very important political lesson, right? Actions have consequences. You know, war takes place in a political context. And Athens had torched a lot of goodwill by morphing from the head of an alliance toward

• 17:41Speaker 01

  the rather assertive head of what was clearly an empire.

• 17:45Demetri Kofinas?

  So I think we should probably fast forward to the Melian Dialogue, but I do want to ask you at some point about Pericles and Pericles' strategy, which you alluded to, as well as his last speech, in which he invokes a word that comes up often in Thucydides' history of the war, which is hatred. And specifically, the hatred of those over whom Athens has ruled its empire, which he calls a tyranny. And that Athenians should be more afraid of what those people will do to them than what they may have to endure in a war with Sparta, which relates directly to the case that Cleon makes for the annihilation and enslavement of the inhabitants of Mytilene after their rebellion in the fifth year of the war, which you juxtapose to the Melian

• 18:27Demetri Kofinas?

  Dialogue and the decision to annihilate their society. Tell us where that fits into your understanding of Athens' progression over the course of the war and why you made it central to your Foreign Affairs article.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, again, the main reason why I brought it up in the piece is because it is so often invoked all the time, almost everywhere, at least if you travel in kind of IR circles. And I do think it's generally misused. So it fits in the very end of that seven-year interregnum that I talked about. Milos had always been on Athens radar screen. It's a small island in the Aegean or a mid-sized island. It was vaguely neutral. It wasn't really actively involved in the fighting, but it was technically an ally of Sparta. Athens had kind of sailed along and kicked some sand in Milos's face earlier in the war. But then here we are in year sixteen or seventeen, and Thucydides stops the action in its tracks, and Athens

• 19:23Speaker 01

  comes and invests the island and sends some emissaries, and that's where this famous dialogue takes place, and says, the emissaries say to the Melians, and this is conducted in private behind closed doors, because there's a lot of interesting politics coming on on both sides, and says, "Look, just surrender to us, or we will lay waste to you all. We will kill all the men, enslave the women and children, and repopulate the island." And the Melians say, "Oh, come on. We're not any problem for you guys. Why can't we just remain quietly neutral?" And Athens says, "No, you must submit and surrender and be vassals of our rule." The Melian representatives in this conversation, maybe they don't speak for the population as a whole, but they go the full Klingon. They say, you know, "Death before dishonor. We will not surrender and be vassals. We've been around

• 20:08Speaker 01

  for a long time, and we want to live in freedom." And after a while, it turns out Milos was not quite the pushover they seemed to be. And also involving a little intrigue within Milos that is underdefined for us by Thucydides, Athens does finally defeat Milos and carries out that massacre and then just moves on. Now, again, what's really interesting about this is that it is irrelevant for the war, and it is not a novel event. We have seen many, many such massacres in the war, quickly described to us by Thucydides at different points in the narrative. But here, he stops the narrative in its tracks and has

• 20:50Speaker 01

  This dialogue and has it end and then it moves on to a very important event in the war. Actually, what he thought was the single most important event of the war. Athens misguided attempt to conquer Sicily. In fact, the sentences connect. I know I'm rambling a bit here, but people who read the book today read it in book form that it comes in eight books. Thucydides did not write in books. That was an intervention of his later translators. He wrote in years and seasons. And since the laying to waste of Melos and the embarking on a Sicilian campaign took place in the same season. The last sentence killed all the men, enslaved all the women and children and repopulated the island. The next sentence is then the Athenians turn to conquer Sicily.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And so the linkages of those two events is going on there. And again, it really remains a fascinating puzzle. Why does Thucydides stop the action and invent a new form? There's no other dialogue in the entire book to talk about this trivial event in the overall course of the war. It was very important to Thucydides, and I don't think we need it to be told. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. First of all, the Athenians said that in their meeting at the Spartan Assembly sixteen years earlier. And secondly, we see that happening over and over and over again in the narrative. So there's no news here in the fact that this happened. So it's inconsequential for the war.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  It's not novel and it tells us nothing we haven't heard before. And it's a new dialogue form. And it's likely Thucydides had to invent a lot of this because he does not name the Athenian emissaries. And often for important speeches, the speakers are named and the Melian participants also unnamed. They were probably massacred, you know, in the war. So at best, he gets secondhand fragments of this conversation. And so the dialogue itself must be reconstructed in Thucydides' mind. And therefore, line for line, it has many things that Thucydides wants to tell us.

• 22:54Demetri Kofinas?

  And what is your argument for why he included that and went into such detail? And is there anything important that we need to understand about how the war was going up until that point?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I think the former more than the latter, and I do want to be very clear. I am a student of this literature. I mean, I do teach a seminar on the Peloponnesian War, but again, it's in translation. So what I want to say is, this is not me. This is what I have gleaned from what classicists have taught us. And classicists suggest that there are three plausible reasons. I don't think they compete with each other. I think they're all right as to why the Melian Dialogue was so important to Thucydides. And so, one of them I've already mentioned, which is it wants to link Athenian arrogance at Melos, and boy, are they arrogant, with their comeuppance in Sicily.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  And so, the appeal for Thucydides of the Melian Dialogue, or the massacre at Melos, as opposed to the massacre at Scio that took place five years earlier, that he covers in one sentence, is that he can use that narrative technique of linking these events and saying, "Melos and Sicily are somehow linked." And so, the linkage between Melos and the Sicilian catastrophe, both rooted in Athenian hubris, are one reason why scholars who study Thucydides say the Melian Dialogue is so important. But there are two other really interesting reasons. Thucydides was a really interesting, we would call him today, a social theorist. And he had so many lessons he wished to impart to us.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  And one of them was, you know, he uses the phrase that people repeat a lot, which is, "War is a harsh teacher." And that's a nice phrase, but I think Thucydides had a lot more to say about war than that. Time and time again in the book, Thucydides is, I'm going to use the word, anxious about the fragility of civilization and how war can actually contribute to the undermining of civilized behavior. And so, other classicists have said, "What's interesting about Melos is how it contrasts with Athenian behavior toward Mytilene." Just earlier in the war, Mytilene, which I hope I'm coming close to pronouncing correctly.

• 25:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Metellini.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Thank you. Was a... valued ally of Athens who was treated fairly well. However, even they were irritated by Athens. And so they tried to undertake what we could call an unspeakable betrayal. They reached out to Sparta and said, guys, maybe we should switch sides in this war. But the Athenians get wind of this. They suppress that because of their naval dominance. They're able to swiftly get over there and crush that attempt. And then they have a conversation at home as to what to do about it. And they say, you know, we should do to these guys. We should just lay waste to them. We should go out there and kill them all. Do what we would eventually do in Melos, although they don't phrase it that way.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  And there's a debate with the demagogue Cleon, who Thucydides did not much like. And he holds the day. But then they wake up the next morning, the Athenians, as Thucydides report, and reflect upon, quote, "so horrid an act that they were contemplating." And they have another debate and another vote. And they decide, no, no, no, we should just go there and kill the people who are responsible for this and not lay waste to the entire, you know, population of this entity. And it's a beautifully told story because one ship had already been sent with the orders to do this, but as Thucydides says, tasked with so horrid and errant. Again, that's a little editorializing there by Thucydides, right? They were kind of tarrying a bit.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  And the second ship was so desperate to stop them, they slept in shifts and they ate while they rode. And they overtook them at the last minute and stopped that horrible massacre from taking place. So another reason why some say Thucydides stops the action to dwell on Melos is that Melos is a trivial backwater, irrelevant for the war. And yet Athens decides to reflexively massacre them all for no good reason. In fact, Melos may have irritated Athens in some way, but Thucydides withholds that in his narrative. He doesn't say anything about what Melos might have done to annoy the Athenians. So all you have is flat out massacre. And so that contrast shows the hardening of the war.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  That earlier in the war, Athens was still the kind of civilization That would not simply reflexively lay waste to another society, even one that it had good reason to be furious with. Whereas late in the war, after sixteen or seventeen years of war, it was simply reflexively barbaric. So that's a second reason why some classical scholars find the Melian dialogue so interesting and why Thucydides dwells on it. Then there's a third reason. The Melians make a lot of great points in the debate. You know, if you do this, people are going to notice and and they're going to kind of politically shy away from you. And they were exactly right in that. I mean, the Melians may have been destroyed,

• 27:59Speaker 01

  but but as a debating team, you know, they kicked butt. You know, they made all the good points in this debate. But they also said, you know, Athenians, you have an interest in not setting the precedent that someone who loses a war gets massacred. Now, Thucydides did not live or did not complete. He lived to see the end of the war, but he did not live to complete his work. It breaks off about seven years before the conclusion of the war. And the narrative is kind of picked up by Xenophon. And Xenophon reports that, yeah, after the Athenians unconditionally surrender, there's a discussion by Sparta and many of Sparta's allies are saying, yes, give Athens the full Melos. You know, these are bad guys and you should kill them all. And I think Donald Kagan has the line, the classical scholar,

• 28:43Speaker 01

  they were right to be concerned about this. This was on the table, right? They could have easily been completely massacred. And luckily for them, they were not. The classical scholar Hunter Rawlings makes a necessarily speculative, but to my eyes, very convincing argument that Thucydides wrote his book in a very parallel way, that things that happened in the first half of the book have parallels in the second half of the book. And Rawlings speculates that the Melian dialogue was so important because it was going to parallel this so-called Athenian dialogue that would have taken place at the end of the war. And that has a really attractive symmetry to it. And these things did come up, as Xenophon reports, in the discussion of what to do with the Athenians.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And Rawlings also makes the point, as do many Other classical scholars that no one in Thucydides' original audience, remember, he was writing for all time, but his first readers had memories of this war. And that would have not been lost on them. The fact that they came very close to being massacred in the way that the Athenians massacred the Melians. So that parallel is very attractive. So those are the three big reasons, I think, why classical scholars have said Thucydides just stops the narrative and it tracks and has this invented dialogue to make all these points. And also, again, I think the Melians make a lot of good political points along the way. So that's interesting to me, too, as an IR person.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  But to bring it all back home, if we may now invoke Bob Dylan. So it is much, much more than that one line. The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must. And much, much more than some lesson that, look, this is what can happen in world politics. You can have all the morals on your side that you want, but force will rule and you'll still get massacred. Again, as I've already said in our discussion, we see examples of that littered throughout the text many times, often Thucydides dwells on them. Other times, he gives it a sentence. Again, the Scion comparison is so fascinating because, as I understand the Greek, and I don't, but as I'm told, he uses the exact same language to describe the massacre of the Athenians at Scion, but he does it in one sentence.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  And other classical historians have described the Melian episode in one sentence because it wasn't important for the war. And so it got a sentence and they moved on. Again, the Melian dialogue was really important to Thucydides because he wanted to teach us things.

• 31:15Demetri Kofinas?

  Fantastic. All right, let's unpack this a bit. So you mentioned, you made an allusion to the Athenian dialogue, which would have been part of this arc, this literary arc of Thucydides, had he completed his histories. That would have presumably been the Athenians pleading their case to the Spartans after the Spartans won the war, right?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 31:33Demetri Kofinas?

  Now, if I'm going heavily off memory here, and there are many dialogues, this can easily get confusing, but if I remember correctly, it was during the dialogue between the Athenian envoys and their Melian counterparts, where the Athenians echoing Pericles' warning about the hatred of those over whom Athens rules. Stated that it isn't the Spartans that they're worried about, or what would happen to them at the hands of the Spartans should they lose the war, but rather what would happen to them should they be overpowered by their subjects, or those over whom they rule their empire. Now, there's also another dialogue that we've already alluded to here, and which you bring up in your Foreign Affairs article,

• 32:14Demetri Kofinas?

  which is the Mytilene debate that happens in Athens in 427 B.C., where two opposing arguments are made, one by Cleon, and these are appeals to the Athenian people at the assembly. And one of them is by Cleon, who, again echoing Pericles, says something to the effect of, "Your empire is a tyranny against those who plot against you," or something like that, and that "you would be fools not to make examples out of the Mytilenes, as it would only invite future rebellions." So be merciless, essentially. And the counterargument is made by Diadatus, who doesn't make a moral argument against genocide, but rather makes a very rational argument, which rests on two stools,

• 32:59Demetri Kofinas?

  one of which is destroying Mytilene would mean the loss of an important revenue stream for the Athenian empire. And the second was that killing everyone, including the innocent, which is what was being proposed by Cleon, would make it less likely that future rebellions would be stopped, because the inhabitants would see no benefit to trying to cut a deal, since no deal could be had. So here we have what is a very cynical argument for preventing a genocide, and what appear to be a series of examples, very instructive examples for how the Athenians view their empire and how they perceive the perception of those over whom they hold power. How important is that for us to understand

• 33:43Demetri Kofinas?

  if we really want to understand the nature of Athenian empire?

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Well, the whole story is really cool, and it's really cool because of Thucydides' narrative techniques. In fact, there were two debates over this. I'm gonna keep saying "Mitheline" because I, you know, my language is bad. And Thucydides withholds from us the first debate. Just like in the debate over the start of the war, Thucydides says, "Many speakers arose to take sides on whether to have the war." But all he gives us as Pericles is pro-war speech, right? So Thucydides is constantly putting his finger on the scale in that way. By allowing Pericles to speak alone, he really gives a lot of weight to Pericles' words, even though there were opponents of the war that actually held the majority in the very beginning of that debate.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Pericles' speech won the people over, as Thucydides writes at the time, "because they were convinced by the wisdom of his advice." Again, contra Allison's understanding of what happened there. But in "Mitheline," sorry for the mispronunciation once again, there were two debates. I radically speculate with no evidence that in the first debate, Diodatus actually made an appeal based in morality. And Cleon said, "Kill them all." And they lost that debate, and their decision was made to kill them all. And then Thucydides only gives us the second debate, in which Cleon says, as you described, "It's politics, man. We need to crush these mothers to scare the hell out of people

• 35:14Speaker 01

  and make sure they understand if you mess with us, this is what's gonna happen." And Diodatus says, "Look, I'm not gonna make any kind of moral argument." And that's why I think this is where he must have, or I think, made one the day before. He says, "I'm gonna make a narrowly interest-based argument, and let's just talk about the politics of this. What will be the political consequences of you doing this?" And again, for reasons you've already articulated, in his view, I share that view, in the longer run, the political implications of Athens behaving that way would lead still more actors to lean away from Athens. And again, war is politics. And so if you're fighting a war and you get everybody in the arena...

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Disenchanted with you and rooting against you, that's not a good thing for your political power and influence and your prospects in the war itself. But we do have this second debate, the only one we're given, in which we have two competing political debates about the use of force. One says, "We must demonstrate our terrifying hand so that nobody will ever dare mess with us in this way ever again." And the other to say, "You will create more enemies than friends by doing this sort of thing." And that is a lesson that Thucydides repeats in the book. Again, Thucydides only rarely speaks in his own voice, he's very clever about that. But he does, time and time again, have people make this observation

• 36:43Speaker 01

  about how certain horrifying acts tend to backfire because of their political implications, even if they win the day in the immediate military battle.

• 36:55Demetri Kofinas?

  So what are the lessons that we should draw, not just from this dialogue, but from the larger history of the Peloponnesian War as told to us by Thucydides?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  So in my view, we mostly think about the grand lesson of the Peloponnesian War incorrectly. I don't think the lesson of the Peloponnesian War is that the rise in Athenian power, you know, and the fear it instilled in Sparta caused the war and that that was some sort of tragedy or crisis. In fact, everything indicates that Thucydides supported that initial war. He was a huge admirer of Pericles. And again, you have that phrase, "That the crowd was persuaded by the wisdom of his advice." Those are Thucydides' words. And he even, at times, seems to hang the entire Athenian loss in the war on the passing of Pericles from the scene, suggesting that if Pericles had remained in power and not been killed in the plague,

• 37:49Speaker 01

  and that his strategy was followed throughout, that Athenian Athens would have emerged more victorious in that conflict. So the tragedy is not in that rise of Athenian power bit, although it's good IR theory for Thucydides to observe that changes to the balance of power are destabilizing and can cause Wars. I like that as a lesson, but there are thirty or forty lessons in this book that you can glean from it. That's why it rewards such careful reading. But what is the book really about? And again, I think Thucydides has a great emphasis on the fragility of civilization. It comes up over and over again throughout the war. But what is the denouement? What is the the central set piece of the work?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  And it is the Sicilian campaign. The description of which takes up about a quarter of the entire book. And it comes right after Milos, and it was the opposite of what Pericles had advocated for. And it was a terrible idea. And Nicchus, maybe not the world's greatest general, but there was a debate about whether to go on and try and conquer Sicily. He speaks in what sounds to me like Thucydides' voice, in which he says, guys, this is crazy. And he has a great line about how you go and seek out enemies elsewhere while you've still got some pretty serious enemies here. This is a very bad idea. He fails in that debate.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  That part of the war is the catastrophe for Athens, is the central set piece of the war. And therefore, I believe if I had to say what the singular most important lesson of the Peloponnesian War was the danger of great power hubris. That great powers are not undermined or destroyed by shifts in the balance of power so much as they are undermined by their own arrogance. And if there's a lesson, it's that great powers need to be alert to the fact that they get very arrogant and eventually bite off more than they can chew. And so I think that's, if he was only reduced to being able to give us one lesson,

• 39:57Speaker 01

  although I do think the civilization thing is very important to him, it would be that, which would be, you know what us old school realists come to call prudence, great power prudence, right? Not not pacifism, right? Thucydides was a general. He led men into battle. He had, you know, he had the values of, you know, Greeks from 2500 years ago. He didn't like shy away from war. Oh, war, that's horrifying. Rather, it was had to do with war in its political context. Again, that's kind of centuries and centuries later, but it's very Clausewitzian, right? What are your political objectives? How will the introduction of the use of force help you advance those political objectives? But the political objectives must always predominate. You don't destroy things for the sake of destroying them.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  That repeatedly rubbed Thucydides the wrong way, the gratuitous exercise of violence. So how war can undermine a society and how great powers, the greatest, the gravest threat to a great power is their own arrogance and hubris, I think, is the grand lesson of the Peloponnesian War, although, again, I think Thucydides has a lot of lessons to give us in a brilliantly written book.

• 41:09Demetri Kofinas?

  Do you see some of those same parallels between the United States and Athens?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely.

• 41:15Demetri Kofinas?

  And do you also feel that war has undermined American democracy and the United States in similar ways?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Well, we have to be cautious here because the US hasn't fought the type of war that is as massive as the Peloponnesian War. And so the links there are not direct. There are two links that I would want to call attention to that I think are important and indirect, which is, especially in the second Trump administration, we are governed or ruled, I guess they would prefer ruled, I'm going to say governed, by an administration that holds the more Cleon-type view that the world is a jungle and the way you succeed in it is by the uninhibited use of force without hesitation and that if you use it

• 42:08Speaker 01

  in that way, people will be cowed and they will submit to you. I think the track record on that is mixed. I mean, maybe it works in Venezuela. Venezuela is not what you'd call a peer competitor, but it's not going to work elsewhere. But I think when you think about American society in a larger sense, one of my great teachers, Robert Gilpin. Wrote, and he was not someone who liked to mix it up in contemporary politics. He very rarely spoke to current events. But as the Iraq war in 2003 approached, he wrote an essay in which he said presciently and brilliantly that this war, which he thought was a ridiculous idea, will have

• 42:48Speaker 01

  consequences for the nature of American society that we have not even begun to comprehend. And it did. I mean, the two long wars that the US fought did not threaten the physical integrity and security of the United States, but it did contribute to the larger hollowing out of American society that we've seen in the 21st century. Now, we could also throw in the global financial crisis and its aftermath. But if you look at those two decades of the 21st century, we do see American society paying the price for hubristic behavior. The idea that, well, we'll just go, you know, knock off Iran and remake society and everyone

• 43:30Speaker 01

  will see our power, be awed by it, and the world will be a better place. Now, it was pretty easy to knock off the Iraqi military in 2003, and that's not surprising. But it's harder to remake a society. And so, in retrospect, that vision of we'll do this, and again, shock and awe, it was the expression of the day, that the entire region would be transformed by the exercise of American power, that was wrong. And even the Afghan war, the US on paper, it looks a tad stronger than Afghanistan, I will say, making a little joke there. But, you know, the Afghans weren't going anywhere, right? All they had to do was stay where they were long enough and resist American power, and

• 44:13Speaker 01

  eventually, the Americans would leave. You could argue over how long they should have waited before they leave, but they were going to go before the Afghans were going to go because, again, the Afghans lived there. So you had these two long, losing wars, both rooted in the idea that we are the hyperpower. We have the capacity to do this. We will impose our will. And get what we want. That's not what happened, but also as Gilpin and others pointed out at the time, the prosecution of those wars and who fought them and how they were fought and what happened when those soldiers came home had a deleterious effect on American

• 44:56Speaker 01

  society more generally. And again, I would combine that with the global financial crisis, which was also brought about in part by an act of American hubris. The American hyperpower of the late 1990s said, "We believe in financial global liberalization and we will impose it on you because we know it's the right thing." Well, actually, it wasn't the right thing, but the arrogance of that power, those things that the US did also contributed to that crisis. And it was another way in which you had a sort of hubristic overreach. So it was a bad couple of decades for America in this century. And both of those problems,

• 45:39Speaker 01

  I think, were rooted in that arrogance and that hubris. And so in that sense, it links up very nicely to Thucydides' warning about what will undo a great power. And what will undo a great power is not being overtaken by adversaries. It will be undone by the mistakes it makes with the full head of steam of its own arrogance and hubris.

• 46:02Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm not a scholar of this period. Obviously, I'm not a classicist, so I may be misremembering here. But as I recall, the Sicilian expedition came after a prolonged period of frustration on the part of Athens at its inability to conclude the war. Of course, the strategy that Pericles had put forward at the beginning of the war was one of retreat into the city walls and relying on the Spartans to eventually exhaust themselves, which hadn't occurred or not occurred fast enough to satisfy the Athenians. And so the Sicilian expedition was, in some sense, it seems to me, at least from my remembrance of it, a way of fighting

• 46:41Demetri Kofinas?

  a war on Athens's terms and in a manner that could disrupt the status quo that for a restless city-state like Athens, I mean, what was that quote by the Corinthians that the Athenians are restless so they cannot give rest to anyone else?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:58Demetri Kofinas?

  That also seems to be a parallel, you know, a restlessness. We're always looking for enemies. We're always looking for regimes to change. We cannot rest. We cannot let the world rest. And that's what this administration in particular has felt like to me. It's felt like a ceaseless percussion of conflict and chaos and now war. And so I wonder, do you feel that as well? And do you see a parallel there between the restlessness of the Athenians and their frustration and impatience over the inconclusion of the war? And their need to overturn the status quo with American restlessness during its period of hegemony and its time as a hyperpower? Whether that be in efforts to effectuate regime change in Iraq or Syria or now in Iran?

• 47:42Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, we seem to continue to create problems for ourselves. And the more we move in response to this restlessness, the faster we seem to be sinking, such that, yes, to your point, we didn't transform the Middle East the way we intended as a result of our inability to exercise patience and above all humility. But we certainly transformed it, just not for the better.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yes. I want to be very cautious about how much I can say to try and unpack the logic of the current administration's behavior. In that, I'm an IR theorist, and I think in a different project unrelated to the Thucydides stuff I've been talking about, I think that my discipline of international relations is facing what I call a second crisis in IR theory. I don't think we have good off-the-shelf explanations to explain the behavior of the United States in its foreign policy at this time. It is idiosyncratic.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  It is not obviously pursuing any definition of the American national interest that most IR scholars would draw up. Its behavior, again, seems to be causing more enemies than friends. Even if you agree with some of the underlying instincts of the ways in which the administration is trying to slightly rejigger the American orientation and its grand strategy, the way it is going about it is absolutely illogical and catastrophic. And I call it a second crisis in IR theory because we had one. Before my discipline did not do a good job anticipating the end of the Cold War and understanding the way in which the Cold War ended.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And that was a big crisis for my discipline of IR theory back then. And there were some really good debates where they said, you know, we really got to think about this and how we can better be IR scholars since we really missed a big one here. Didn't see it coming and didn't end the way we kind of thought it would end. And it happened very suddenly. Similarly, the behavior of the United States right now does not fall into accord with any of our existing theories. And different writings I've explained, some people call this realism. We can talk about this, but I think we've already talked about this in the other podcast. Trust me, as a card carrying realist, this is not realism by any stretch of the imagination. You know, is it a personalist kleptocracy?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Is it what Steve Walt called predatory hegemony? Is it what other scholars have called neo royalism? Whatever it is, we don't have an existing theory to explain this type of bizarre and counterproductive behavior. So I really got to say, I just can't do that. But with regard to Thucydides, I do think the observation you made about the restlessness of the Athenians is an important one. And one of the many, many wonderful lessons that Thucydides has to pass down to us is even in the Sicilian debate, but in the debates throughout the war, it's always the young arrogant men who are the troublemakers.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  And so the war had been going on for a while and there hadn't been many glorious victories. And so when they were debating the Sicilian campaign, it was generally the older folks who said, you know, this may not be a good idea, but the younger members of society wanted more a taste of that action and glory. And that drive, that very Athenian drive really won the day in that debate. So many people have observed that that Athenian restlessness. And as you already observed, when the Corinthians go to Sparta and yell at the Spartans, it's like, you guys just sit there and do nothing, whereas the Athenians are. Constantly on the go and they're doing this, they're doing that. It really was. The war was also, has also been well described as a conflict between two distinct national characters.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Right? You do have this American national character, which tends to want it to do big things. Right? If you see a problem, you can do it. And also, the absence of constraints allows it to do such things. Right? Why could the US fight the Vietnam War the way it did? Why could the US fight the Iraq War the way it did? Because it had massive amounts of power and no obvious nearby security threats. That's a very rare combination, and I think Thucydides would tell us that often leads to making big mistakes. The lack of constraints, right? Having a peer military competitor can actually be very tempering of your behavior

• 52:19Speaker 01

  because you really have to prioritize what is actually important to you and to the so-called national interest.

• 52:27Demetri Kofinas?

  That's a great point, and I don't know that I would describe China as a peer competitor, or certainly not Russia. But the United States finds itself in a more operationally constrained geopolitical environment today than it did in 2003. What explains its behavior in light of that fact? In other words, it doesn't seem, I mean, we're back in the Middle East again.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:51Demetri Kofinas?

  After a generation, you know, there's just a little over 20 years since the onset of the Iraq War. And we are back in an intractable conflict. Obviously, we don't have troops on the ground. It's not comparable to Iraq in that sense. We're back into a situation where we went into the war with an intention to effectuate change. Not entirely clear what we wanted, at least not from the public statements. And now we're back in the situation where we did all this damage. We've changed the dynamic, and it's not clear whether we're even going to stick around or just walk away. And so what explains that behavior, especially if you want to add to it the politics, which is that the Trump administration ran explicitly on no new foreign wars.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  So, you know, what explains this again? IR theories in a lot of trouble here. If you look either from a realist perspective, but we don't get to bog down into sub-disciplinary debates, but just in a perspective of the American national interest. Most scholars looking at the American national interest would say, gosh, the US is relatively less powerful vis-à-vis China than it was 10, 20 years ago, certainly. And if there is a threat, I'm going to phrase it more as a political threat than as an active military threat that's emerging on the horizon. It is China. And so if the US has limited resources and more challenges, it really needs to think about prioritizing things.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  I'm really not aware of a scholar who says things like that. And if you chalk, you know, wrote it up on a blackboard, you'd say, from where should we pull back? And from where should we pull back? The answer is exactly the Middle East, right? And maybe it made sense to defend Persian Gulf oil in the 1970s and we were, the world was so dependent on it. And the US was, you know, very energy, much an energy importer. Now the US is one of the world's largest energy exporters. The Persian Gulf is much less important to the United States than it has been in the last half-century easily. So if you want to rejigger your forces, you should be getting out of the Middle East and shifting some resources towards bolstering your position in East Asia.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  I don't think to have a war. I'm not shopping for a war with China. But again, back to politics, back to the way George Kennan would look at this. What you need to do is give like-minded powers and your political and military allies in the region, the confidence that you're going to stay engaged so that they will have the confidence to resist China's dominance as it becomes increasingly powerful in the region. So investing more in the Middle East, again, is a bizarre choice. It cannot be explained by any off-the-shelf IR theories. It can be explained a little bit if you think of the US government as a personalist kleptocracy.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  I mean, it is a matter of fact, and I know that many people would say, oh, this is just Trump derangement syndrome. But no, not to recognize this is Trump delusion syndrome. This is the singularly most overtly corrupt presidential administration in American history, full stop. And the behaviors are astonishing. And if you had written them down in advance and said, would the president do that? You would say, oh, my God, not a chance. You know, would President Biden or Obama sell cryptocurrency from the White House and make a billion dollars doing it? I mean, these are beyond the imagination. So if you start to think of the US foreign policy as run by a cotier of kleptocratic leaders,

• 56:26Speaker 01

  then the Middle East is a place where they have a lot of personal business interests. And so not from the US national interest, but from the kind of personalist interests, staying involved in the Middle East has a little more of a logic to it. But for US foreign policy, it's absolutely catastrophic. One is, it does reveal the limits of what bombarding a country can do, especially a large country. If you wanted to take out Iran, you probably would have to put boots on the ground. And I don't think that would work either. It's a very large country. I think that would be a terribly stupid idea, but it's just not going to happen from the air, even with our impressive air might.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And we have depleted many of our most important munitions in that effort. The types of munitions that my Asian Studies scholars tell me, we had been building up with an eye towards a possible military confrontation in Asia. So if Asia is where the action is, we've really undermined our position there with this. I'm going to reach for the word ridiculous Iran war. And so again, IR theory cannot explain it. But if we get into. Theories of what is motivating this particular administration and stop thinking about the national interest and start thinking about the personalist interest, then we can

• 57:51Speaker 01

  at least through the weeds see some logics to this behavior. But even then, it's hard to explain. It's hard to explain why to this morning or this afternoon in Europe, the President of the United States would announce that Spain is a country of losers who he wants nothing to do with and should cut off all trade with. I mean, you may want to take a tougher line with Europe on international trade or be irritated with European support for NATO, but that's just not the way a thoughtful strategist would comport themselves.

• 58:25Demetri Kofinas?

  So I do want to ask you about our alliance networks. One question before I do that. The way I learned about the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater and the Republicans coming up to the White House was that there came a point where the revelations of the break in at the Watergate Hotel and the subsequent cover up became too much for institutional Washington to allow and for the Republican Party to allow. And so Nixon had to go. That institutional integrity seems to be missing today. And my question is, was it always missing? If not, what explains this? There seems as though

• 59:09Demetri Kofinas?

  there's been a hollowing out of the institutions and also corruption of our culture as a nation.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  I think you're exactly right about all of those things. I do want to pause to make a public service announcement, which is Vice President Vance said that Watergate would be a 12-hour story today. And I need to add that what J.D. Vance doesn't know about Watergate could fill stadiums. This was a very big deal. It was not about the break in. It was about a vaster range of crimes by the executive branch. Not going to dive into that here, but you can read up on this. It was a very, very big deal. I mean, not perhaps what we see done on a daily basis today. But in the context of the political behavior in American history, it was unprecedented. It was a constitutional crisis. It was a very big deal.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And finally, as you said, you know, Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, you know, goes to the president and says, you know, this is enough. And what was being invoked there was something we have lost, which was, the phrase I would use is institutions defending their institutional prerogatives. And I do think we've lost that, and I do think that is also sort of unprecedented. Even if you were, say, a Democratic president, dealing with a Democratic Speaker of the House, you did not mess with the authority of the Speaker of the House on the things that the Speaker of the House thought was the business of the House of Representatives, and similarly, the Senate.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Today, we have a Speaker of the House who serves at the pleasure of the president. So this is kind of shattering the notion that we have these distinct epicenters of authority throughout society, you know, with the three branches of government, for example. It is shocking to me the extent to which our legislative institutions, and our judiciary for that matter, at the highest levels, has ceded its authority as a peer institutional power of this executive branch. I don't understand why that has happened. It probably roots to the underlying dysfunctional crisis of American society today.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  That something has happened internally that has brought that about. But it's mind-boggling. It is mind-boggling that the House and the Senate do not insist upon asserting their institutional prerogatives. I mean, you try and tell LBJ, when he was the Senate Majority Leader, that you wanted this to happen over his objections, and he would have eaten you for lunch, you know, Democrat or Republican. Whereas nowadays, you know, again, not only is that not happening, but you have a Supreme Court that has immunized the president. I feel fairly confident that if...

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  The Supreme Court had immunized the president in 1970, all of the crimes that Nixon committed during Watergate, and they were crimes. If any of us committed them, we'd be behind bars right now. They would say, well, it's president. He's above the law, as the Supreme Court now tells us. And so part of the current American civilizational crisis has come from the renunciation of authority by otherwise co-equal branches of government.

• 1:02:32Demetri Kofinas?

  So Jonathan, last question for you, and that has to do with our alliance structures. Much of what we talked about today has been military power. And of course, military power is elemental. But so much of how America has wielded power since the end of the Second World War has been what we call soft power. It's been through the institutions that we created after the end of that war. I mean, one parallel with the conversation we're having earlier is the Delean League. The United States seems to be undoing many of those institutions, if not literally, certainly tacitly, or if not explicitly, certainly tacitly. What are the consequences to our alliance networks and to those sources of American power? And can any of that damage be undone after the end of this administration?

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  It will not be easy to undo the damage because everybody around the world has to understand that this is what the American political system can produce, especially with the reelection of Trump, right? That means the American public wasn't kidding. This is what America must look like to the rest of the world. And even if the next president looks different, it doesn't matter in that we know that America can easily produce this. And again, IR theory, it's a world of anarchy. You have to make assessments about the behavior of other actors in the system. And so assessments of what the US may or may not do

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  must now change everywhere in the world. Now, I want to make a few qualifications to this. I'm among those who bemoaned the end of the American order. I did it in print, but many of my colleagues pointed out to me, well, you know, everything ends, right? That order was forged 75 years ago. It's not shocking that we had a certain order and that order came to a close. It's really about how the order ends and what replaces it. And so you could also have good IR debates about the nature of the relationship between the US and its European allies. It's understandable that the US has expressed frustration for decades that Europe has not done more for its own self-defense. That's certainly a good debate to have.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  But what we don't have an understanding of as to why the US would torch its alliances.

• 1:04:55Demetri Kofinas?

  That's right. That's a good word to use.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and turn former intimate friends into, at best, diffident affiliates, but perhaps even ultimately in the long run adversaries, you know, if you push it along the way, who look at the US with wariness and suspicion. Again, I'm going to quote Bob Dylan again because I love to quote Bob Dylan. We live in a political world. Politics rules. Most of the time, we're not deciding things by wars. We're deciding things by political contestation. And so shedding your allies and behaving in a way that makes everybody in the world not like you is simply politically unwise.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  But there's also, and this may be even the grandest failure of this administration, how credible are US commitments to other countries? And this is the, the big, big question in East Asia. Because the question on the table in East Asia is not, is China going to invade us all and swallow us up? It's rather, is China's power going to mean that its political will will ultimately be irresistible and that China will come to politically dominate almost all of East Asia? And a lot of the calculations that the states of that region have to make is, can we push back against that political...

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Dominance and part of that will depend on whether they think the US will be an engaged partner in East Asia should push come to shove. I think the US is behaving in the world like a bully. And most bullies, when confronted, tend to back down. And I think a lot of actors in East Asia have to wonder if there actually does break out a war in the region. Will the US show up? Or will it throw a few punches and then scurry back home? And, and again, maybe the US won't do that, maybe the US will do that. It is on the table that the US may not be a trustworthy political and military partner.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  And that is something that will not easily be repaired.

• 1:07:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, well said, and even if the US does show up, I don't know how relevant that is. Because to your larger point, I think the US has proven itself to be an untrustworthy ally. And one with which you cannot reliably collaborate. So even if you are of the view that this latest war was taken on behalf of Israel. The American administration has wavered so many times throughout the course of the war. And been so often at public odds with the Israeli prime minister. And has entertained conclusions of the conflict that would put the Israelis in a worse position. Than they were at the start of the conflict, that even in such cases where you think. The US is working on behalf of an ally or partner. They're not, or they're not doing so reliably.

• 1:07:51Demetri Kofinas?

  And the same thing has been true of its relationship to the Europeans and NATO. So the larger question, or I would say, one of the larger questions is. What conclusions can we draw about the future of American foreign policy from this administration? That can be applied to the next one. How much of this is a deeper expression of the polities will? And how much of it is a unique facet of this particular administration, which? I grant you is a, it's unique, I mean. Lots of presidents are corrupt, but this one. He isn't just corrupt, he's engaged in a kind of corruption that seems inexplicable for a man of his age who is creating enmity for his family that cannot be justified by

• 1:08:35Demetri Kofinas?

  the billions of dollars that he's been able to extract through these various forms of grift and corruption. So it's hard to understand. I mean, I think in some sense, he really is a cinematic figure. And so much of what he does is a visceral expression of his deepest animal instincts, combined with his sense of stage presence and his always on, I always gotta keep the ducks quacking and keep the ratings up mentality. And I feel like that constant need to generate attention and keep the attention on him explains a lot of what he does. You know, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if you have any other things you'd like to add, Jonathan, or closing thoughts before we wrap it up, but those are mine.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I have several closing thoughts about that. One is that Trump's behavior is consequential, and it will not be good for the US. The US will leave the Trump administration a lonelier and less politically influential entity on the world stage. But now I want to say something a little strange, which is, I think Trump is analytically irrelevant. I mean, obviously, I'm not a fan, but what's important as an IR person about Trump is not what he does, but the fact of the society that has produced him. I think we are looking, I think the real

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  problem rests within something that has happened in American society. And we've already talked about the institutional erosion. You talked about the making billions. Another powerful entity that has rolled over is our plutocratic class, right? Most of our billionaires sort of shied away from Trump initially, and now have rolled over and are on board. I was at a workshop recently, in which it was at a place where people, some of them new billionaires, and they say, every billionaire now wants to be a trillionaire. And this is mind boggling to me. It's like, you know, I feel like- If I had fifty billion dollars, I'd be kind of good with the cash. My goal in life would not be to chase ever more wealth.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  And so this is another difference, I think, in American society then and now. You have another possible counterweight rolling over toward the administration. And that is, you know, our most famous plutocrats, our most famous billionaires, who were really kind of sucking up to the administration in a desperate attempt to get even more money. And again, what I think we're seeing here is not a problem of Trump, but a broader social failure of all of the institutions and participants in American society that are behaving, to my eyes, differently than they behaved in the past. And so again, this is what I was talking about earlier, about what can IR theory tell us about this?

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  I think IR theorists have to be able to do better at understanding the nature of societies. And that's not something we're usually comfortable doing. We like to look outward and look only at foreign policy. But part of that derives from, you know, the country that is practicing that foreign policy. And so my pessimism derives from the fact that Trump will, of course, inevitably leave the scene. But the society that produced a Trump will endure.

• 1:11:57Demetri Kofinas?

  A sobering thought. I think also what's going on here, Jonathan, is that there's a power grab in American democracy. And that the desire to acquire greater amounts of wealth reflects the way in which wealth has become a gateway to power. And I think that's sort of the insight there as to why people are looking to accumulate more and more amounts of money. Because those folks now have a shot, whether it's at the presidency, whether it's controlling the presidency, in a way that just wasn't possible ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yes, let me give a shout out to a book by the Financial Times columnist, Martin Wolf. It's called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. And he really talks about how the concentrations of wealth and the way that wealth then captures power is a large part of our current problem.

• 1:12:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Jonathan, this was wonderful. I always love talking to you. It was great to have you at our last dinner in New York. And I'm just a huge fan of your work, so I cannot recommend it enough. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

• 1:12:57Demetri Kofinas?

  If you enjoyed listening to today's episode and want to join in on the conversation by becoming a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can do that at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas

• 1:13:39Demetri Kofinas?

  and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.