Thucydides, Trump and the Nature of Power
How the Melian Dialogue Might Give the Current Administration Cause for Concern
The early days of the second Trump administration contained some unwelcome surprises for America’s allies. Trade wars waged through tariffs, even against friendly nations, the threat of annexing nearby territories, stern words for Europe and a rough ride for Zelensky in the Oval Office: here was a new regime with little time for diplomatic niceties. One thing that Trump did seem to respect was strength, and so before long commentary on current affairs was awash in references to Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, together with its classic line, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” (e.g., here or here.)
The Melian Dialogue is certainly the best known part of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Because of its brevity, it seems often to be assigned on its own in classes on international relations or political science, with the result that one often encounters people whose only knowledge of Thucydides comes from it. In fact, it is short enough, and provides an introduction to principles so fundamental to political and social action, that readers unfamiliar with it might want to read it right now (it can be found online here or here for a PDF). It does pack an emotional punch in the end.
I have touched on the dialogue before, in my post on Lyons and Lewis, but here I want to take a look at its central theme, which provides a note of caution in relation to the foreign policy emanating from Washington these days.
The basic action surrounding the Melian Dialogue is as follows. The tiny island city of Melos, which had taken a position of neutrality in the war between Athens and Sparta (i.e., the “Lacedaimonians”), finds itself confronted by an overwhelming invading force from the Athenian empire, the preeminent naval power, which demands, at the point of a sword, that Melos become a tributary “ally” of Athens. Before attacking, however, the Athenians try to convince the Melians to give in without a fight, and the resulting exchange is recorded by Thucydides in what is now called the Melian Dialogue.
As they try to convince the Melians to give in, the Athenians take a position from which the realities of power are all that count. They demand that safety is the only proper focus of the discussion, and effectively dismiss moral claims, redefining a word in a well-known formulation: “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians provide a mirror image to all this, leaning heavily upon normative concerns such as (conventional) justice and honour, and they respond to the Athenian redefinition of justice as subordinate to power with the suggestion that justice can in fact be a kind of power in itself – e.g., the unjust Athenian attack on Melos might persuade other neutral cities to take up arms against Athens, or the Spartans might be moved by the just claims of their Melian kinsmen to send help to Melos.
In the opposing standpoints of the Melians and Athenians, we have the Thucydidean theme know as “justice and power.” It runs through much of his work, but it is in this dialogue that it finds its most accessible and straightforward presentation. The ideas at the heart of this theme can be summarised as follows. There are two fundamentally different ways in which we might relate to other people: we might try to force them to do as we wish, or we might develop a relation of trust with them, in which they might act in a manner agreeable to us of their own volition. To the extent that we rely on force, we will tend to destroy trust; to the extent that we rely on trust, we tend to leave an opening for others to use force against us.
If one knows nothing of Thucydides beyond the Melian Dialogue, its message will seem to be a simple and straightforward one. The Melians allow themselves to be moved by justice and honour, and talk hopefully of Spartan intervention, of fortune and the gods. The Athenians, on the other hand, place their faith in their present, observable, material power, in the superiority of their navy and army, and point to the importance of safety and self-preservation. The final result of the episode – the total destruction of Melos and the Melians – surely puts the matter beyond doubt: the Athenians are right and the Melians are wrong. Thus understood, the episode provides a lesson against forgetting the overriding importance of the realities of power, and a warning against assuming that justice will win out in the end (lessons that Western societies might do well to remember today). One might go further than this, and see Thucydides as an advocate of the views espoused by the Athenians.
However, it is very often the case with Thucydides that matters that appear simple on their own turn out to be rather more complicated, and take on another aspect, when seen in a wider light. In the case of the Melian Dialogue, we don’t need to look very far, because it is immediately followed by the account of the Sicilian expedition, in which the Athenian army is totally annihilated, something I took up in my last post. The Melian Dialogue is filled with allusions to the Sicilian expedition, and these lead us to a truth in the words of the Melians, one no less important than the sort of power found in naked force.
When the Athenians point repeatedly in the Melian Dialogue to the fact that the Melians are islanders, while the Athenians are “masters of the sea,” it seems at first simply to suggest Athenian rationality and commitment to the facts: they are giving a reason why intervention from Sparta is unlikely – indeed, impossible – and are thus showing why resistance on the part of the Melians is futile. The Melians, on the other hand, seem to be avoiding the reality of the situation when they fail to acknowledge such considerations to be decisive. However, in the course of the Sicilian expedition, the Spartans will send aid to the island of Sicily, aid that turns out to be decisive in its effect, and the Athenian mastery of the sea will be overcome by the Syracusans, who learn to beat the Athenian navy in the novel conditions of the Great Habour at Syracuse. That is, in a respect in which the Athenians seem at first glance to be simply correct and the Melians seem to be most unreasonable, there is an implicit connection with the undoing of Athens.
There are other implicit connections with the Sicilian expedition. The Melians talk repeatedly of neutrals, i.e., of those allied neither to Athens nor to Sparta, and of how the Athenian attack on Melos might move those neutrals to become actively hostile to Athens. This doesn’t happen in relation to Melos, but it does happen in response to the Sicilian expedition. At Melos, the Athenians warn against trusting in prophecies and oracles, and declare that “the Athenians never once yet withdrew from a siege for fear of any” – and yet at Sicily they do put their faith in oracles, and do withdraw from a siege in fear. So in the midst of what seems a straightforward triumph of Athenian power at Melos we find allusions to a crushing Athenian defeat. One could continue with other connections between Melos and the Sicilian expedition as well.
The point of these allusions becomes clearer if we look to the cause of Athenian defeat (my last post touched on one aspect of this). A decisive factor was the atmosphere of distrust among citizens within Athens as the Sicilian expedition was being prepared, which soon led to a plot against one of the expedition’s commanders, which led to his defection from Athens to Sparta, and to the crucial advice he then gave to the Spartans, which led in turn to the arrival of Spartan aid to Syracuse at a decisive moment. That is, it was a lack of trust within Athens at the time of the Sicilian expedition that provided a cause of the total annihilation of the Athenian army at Sicily – the very sort of consideration to which the Melians pointed in the Melian Dialogue.
So the Melians were pointing at something true after all, even if that truth takes a somewhat different form than they had thought, and it is a truth we can find running through the gradual decline of Athens over the course of the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides lays before us in his work. I will confine myself here to one telling sentence, from a moment long before the catastrophe at Syracuse, when relations between citizens were not characterised by distrust and plots, and Athenian power was at its height. Here is Thucydides explaining the cause of Pericles’ power within Athens: “being capable through his reputation and his judgment, and being manifestly most incorruptible by money, he restrained the multitude freely, and was not led by them but himself led, on account of not speaking to please to acquire power from what was not proper, but because, having power through his character, he even spoke against them angrily.” That is, Thucydides explains the power of Pericles to a very great degree by normative considerations, and these align with the views of the Melians: his reputation and character, his superiority to money, his refusal to seek power by improper means. That is to say that Thucydides agrees, at least to some degree, with the Melian contention that there can be a sort of power in justice. The disaster at Sicily shows us the other side of this truth, the danger that lies in abandoning normative constraints to such a degree that citizens conspire against one another. (See the book, pp. 80-82; the basic idea here is one that will be taken up by Plato, but that’s another story.)
Understanding the Melian Dialogue requires that we take this truth of the Melians and bring it in relation with the truth presented by the Athenians – “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power” – which also points to something true, though not exactly in the way the Athenians thought. The case of Athens, we have just seen, shows that a situation characterised by satisfactory normative relations exerts a kind of power of itself, so in some sense, right is in question everywhere, regardless of power relations. Nevertheless, to trust in it in the way that the Melians do is a foolish mistake: the realities of power must always be kept in mind in the manner of the Athenians, not the Melians; the mistake is to think that that is the end of the matter.
The point is not to come to some grand theoretical harmony of the principles at work here, but rather to understand each of them on its own, and thus to be able to apply them in an intelligent manner as particular occasions arise. If the fate of the Melians shows the danger of leaning too far in one direction, so too does the fate of Athens at Sicily show the danger of leaning too far in the other. (The idea that Thucydides’ own views do not align with those of the Athenians at Melos is not a revolutionary one, and even made its way into a few of the pieces of recent commentary on the Trump administration, such as this or this.)
Turning back from antiquity to our own time, we can see one important respect in which international relations today do not reflect conditions then. The Athenians at Melos are afraid of their subjects – in fact, they claim to be more afraid of them than they are of their official enemies, the Spartans. The picture we get of the Athenian Empire is of an entity held together by fear, by the ability of Athenian power to overawe others. It provides an example of the claim that “right... is only in question between equals in power:” Athens is more powerful than her subjects, and it is power alone that determines the relationship. American power is a very different matter. Certainly it could frighten American allies if it had to, but that has never been the aim of US foreign policy – nor has there been any reason for Americans to worry that if they fall, their allies would try more vigorously to destroy them than America’s enemies would. No, the American alliance has long been exactly that: an association of states with common interests, to be sure, but also with general outlooks that are at least aligned, and which therefore form the basis of mutual understanding and trust.
John F. Kennedy gave expression to this sort of thing on a visit to Canada in 1961: “We share far more than a common border. We share a common heritage… Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.” There is more at work here than mere rhetoric.
American power is different from Athenian power, then, by virtue of its being based on both sides of the divide we see between the Melians and the Athenians at Melos, on justice and power, on trust and force. American power therefore lacks the brittleness and instability, as well as the fear, that Thucydides brings to light in the Athenian Empire. It accordingly attains something undreamed of in Athens. However strong you are in material terms, you will be stronger still if you have friends you can depend on.
Or rather, American power did lack that brittleness and instability. With the new administration, one begins to wonder where things will end up. What have we seen from the new administration that suggests they understand the importance of friendly relations with others? When have they shown themselves skilled at making friends? Certainly it is not difficult to come up with examples of this administration creating ill-will.
The whole tariff business has not only created ill-will, it began to create a parting of interests among allies. The famous Zelensky meeting back in February will have weakened the perception of the value of US friendship everywhere. I visited Canada this past summer and found a level of anti-American sentiment I had never seen before, or imagined possible. Stores carried signs declaring that they carried no US products, which is certainly new (given the sudden change in US tariff policy, which will cause real harm to many Canadian – and American – businesses, it’s hard to blame Canadians). The kind of goodwill that existed between America and her allies has been dealt a devastating blow – and for what? A price has been paid for no gain.
I can remember that as the executive orders rolled out at the beginning of this year, some of them targeting the DEI industry, somebody suggested (I can no longer remember who) that in at least one respect it didn’t really matter if the Democrats won in 2028, for one reality had changed decisively: a DEI sinecure could never again be what it was. The threat of another Republican administration would always loom, and with it the possible end to many DEI jobs. Those jobs must now come with a kind of insecurity that they once did not. Something similar must be the case in international relations. Whatever happens after Trump, it will take an awfully long time to rebuild the trust and goodwill that was once there as a matter of course.
Now of course, America does not strictly need friends, and is capable of dealing with direct threats on her own. But friends are a form of power. No, America did not absolutely need their European and other allies in Afghanistan or Iraq, but the hundreds of European soldiers who died there each represented an American who didn’t die but might have. That is a kind of power. It is also not difficult to imagine scenarios in which the US is pulled to multiple theatres at once, in which help freely given from allies might prove most useful. A move away from mutual goodwill is generally a move away from maximal power. Why not aim at having it all?
Thucydides is not only interested in these two kinds of power, trust and force. He is also interested in the logic inherent in each. With that in mind, consider this summary of one aspect of US foreign policy: “the pro-Trump theory is that America will force the other nations of the world to ally economically with it against China.” (emphasis mine) It’s a marvellous statement: force… to ally. It makes me think of Thucydides, because of its uneasy internal logic: to the extent that you force people, you risk creating resentment and hostility, which will tend to undermine an alliance. This sort of thing can work, at least for a while, but it more closely resembles the brittle power of the Athenian Empire than it does the more broadly-based power that America once enjoyed.
The system of alliances that America built up after the Second World War, which did not only depend on fear and the threat of force, but also on mutual regard and goodwill, were something that Thucydides does not seem really to have imagined. For him, relations between states seem largely to have boiled down to power relations, with little more being possible. He would, however, have recognised the immense advantages conferred by a series of relationship based on trust, and would have regarded any policy producing a move away from this situation as being in need of improvement.