Classical Antiquity and the Politics of America: From George Washington to George W. Bush

Chapter 8. Thucydides and the Cold War

127 Thucydides and the Cold War For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences . . . [but] will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that 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. —Thucydides 5.89 (adapted from the Crawley translation) From Machiavelli and Hobbes to George Marshall and Henry Kissinger, political theorists and practitioners have regarded Thucydides as a paradigm for studying the ways of the world and the interactions of states. His definition of power, cited in the above epigraph from the Melian Dialogue, is surely the first such analysis in the Western tradition. Its military essence is self-evident, and modern political theorists have redefined it only slightly. With his history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) recognized as the inspiration for the realist school of international relations that dominated American foreign policy in the decades after World War II, Thucydides was extensively studied for his concept of the balance of power and his distinctions between underlying and immediate causes sLawrence A. Tritle Chapter 8 Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 127 128 Thucydides and the Cold War of war.1 Writing in 1981, political scientist Robert Gilpin (born 1930) questioned whether modern students of international relations know anything that Thucydides and his contemporaries did not.2 In February 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War, Secretary of State George Marshall (1880–1959) gave an important address at Princeton University in which he called for continued American vigilance in world affairs. Much of the speech dealt with the lessons to be learned from history , and among his examples Marshall noted the intellectual impact and legacy of Thucydides. “I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens,” Marshall said.3 Thucydides’s influence continued to be reflected in the Cold War writings of political scientists such as Robert Gilpin, Henry Kissinger (born 1923), Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980) and Kenneth Waltz (born 1924). All of them regarded Thucydides as a guide illustrating the ambitions and actions of superpowers, as well as the problems that engulfed smaller states caught up in the wake of superpower conflict. In the second edition, published in 1954, of Morgenthau’s influential work Politics Among Nations—the “Bible” for proponents of political realism—he approvingly cited the statement of the Corinthians before the second congress at Sparta in 432 B.C. (when Sparta and her allies together voted to go to war, 1.124.1),4 that “an identity of interest is the surest of bonds whether between states or individuals.” Thucydides was employed to justify the primacy of national interest over international idealism in forging alliances and setting foreign policy. Morgenthau kept the citation in the subsequent editions of the book published throughout the duration of the Cold War (third edition, 1960; fourth, 1967; fifth, 1972; sixth [posthumously], 1985).5 Journalists and historians during the Cold War era also looked to the Peloponnesian War for ideas and arguments in interpreting the events they saw and recorded. In 1953, William H. McNeill compared Stalin’s refusal to aid the Warsaw uprising in 1944 to Thucydides’s account of the failure of the Spartans to assist the Melians in their vain attempt to stave off destruction of their island home by the Athenians in 416 B.C.6 Writing in 1969, historian Donald Kagan compared Spartan refusal to participate in an Athenian-proposed congress in 449 B.C. to the Soviet Union’s refusal to participate in the Marshall Plan in 1947.7 At a news conference while serving as secretary of state, Henry Kissinger suggested that the Cold War was a new Peloponnesian War between a United States “Athens” and a Soviet “Sparta.” An astute journalist asked, “Does that mean we’re bound to lose?”8 Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 128 Lawrence A. Tritle 129 Cold War political scientists operated from two basic assumptions about Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War: that he described a group of states divided into two factions, with...