Ancient Greek reflections on imperial power have unsettling resonance in the geopolitics of Donald Trump.
We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.’ White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s comment concerning Greenland took me back to the confrontation between presidents Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025. Trump harangued Zelensky with the refrain: ‘You don’t have the cards.’ By implicit contrast, the Americans had them all, or almost all – perhaps the Russians had a few. At Davos in January the Canadian prime minister encapsulated the point with Thucydides’ apophthegm: ‘The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’
It comes from the ‘Melian Dialogue’, spliced into The History of the Peloponnesian War. In 416 BC leading citizens of the small island of Melos attempted to reason the Athenians out of their unprovoked demand that Melos either surrender or face conquest – a choice of enslavement or death. The words quoted by Mark Carney are those of the Athenians, who explicitly refuse to fabricate any ethical justification for their actions, thereby denying their Melian interlocutors any appeal to justice. The Dialogue is celebrated as the pithiest analysis of the logic of great power imperialism ever written. It is invoked in any good textbook on international relations. But it was not the first extant consideration of the doctrine that might is right. As early as the eighth century BC, Hesiod sang of a hawk advising a nightingale clasped in its claws that resistance would be idiotic. Nor was it to be the last, or the most philosophically nuanced.
Plato wrote his dialogues in the first half of the fourth century BC, but they are all located in the lifetime of Socrates, Thucydides’ contemporary. In the most famous, The Republic, Socrates attempts to define what justice is. The opening book consists of interlocutors challenging him with their definitions. The most important, because the most problematic for Socrates, is the final gauntlet, thrown down by Thrasymachus. ‘Justice’, says Thrasymachus provocatively, ‘is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.’ He thereby presents justice as intrinsic exclusively to power relationships. The compliance of the weak with the strong, the obedience of ruled to ruler, is what is commonly termed justice, but only from the perspective of the ruled. ‘Injustice’, in counterpoint, is what is in the interest of the ruler, but only from the perspective of ‘those who have the power of subduing cities and nations’. In other words, justice from the point of view of the ruled is injustice from the point of view of the ruler. These widely used, conventionally ethical terms have no meaning outwith such a context. It follows that in truth the word justice is quite devoid of its generally accepted ethical content.
There is no proof that Plato had read Thucydides. But the parallels between the views of the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue and those of Thrasymachus in The Republic are so close that it is difficult not to believe that in putting them in the mouth of a notable sophist at large in late fifth-century Athens, Plato had the Dialogue in mind. Even if he had not read it, its primary focus is on the logic of Athens’ expansion, and that was a subject of great moment for Plato. The rest of The Republic is an attempt to answer the contention to which Thrasymachus had given brazen expression.
The only reason the Athenians offer for the annexation of Melos is Athenian security. Of course, Melos itself could offer no threat to Athens. Paradoxically, it was because Melos was so insignificant that the Athenians felt obliged to seize it. Should they have failed to do so, the suspicion might have arisen among their rivals that Athens was weaker than it seemed. Also, Athens’ reluctant allies might have become restive. It was in these senses alone that the Athenians perceived annexation to be advantageous.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Trump’s threats to an island vastly larger than Melos, justified by invoking US security interests, should have reminded Carney of the Melian Dialogue. Similar thoughts have occurred to others in the US and Germany. But there has been no attempt to explore the relevance of the more elaborate treatment of the theme which the Dialogue inspired in Plato. Thrasymachus might also be considered as a more sinuous harbinger of Miller’s ‘iron laws’.
Thrasymachus the Chalcedonian was reputed to be bombastic in his rhetorical style. His name – literally ‘bold fighter’ – implies that he was belligerent. He was an apt choice on Plato’s part to advance the case placed in his mouth in The Republic. In this incarnation, Thrasymachus might judge the sort of thing currently posted on Truth Social too crude even for his tastes; but the sentiments expressed are spot on.
Thucydides and Plato prompt still more disturbing thoughts. The former presents the Melian episode immediately before a far more ambitious attempt to annex the much bigger island of Sicily. Melos was a pushover, but the Sicilian expedition proved a military disaster. However, what did for Athens in the end was not that reverse, but, as the Athenians had dimly anticipated in the Dialogue, the closet hatred of their allies, stoked by resentment at their treatment by their masters. Their eventual betrayal made Spartan victory possible. Thucydides and Plato saw unprincipled Athenian aggrandisement as a function of what we might now term democratic populism. It turned out to be deeply perilous to the perpetrator. Unfortunately, Trump majored in Economics, not Classics.
George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of St Hugh’s College at the University of Oxford.
Link : https://www.historytoday.com/archive/making-history/donald-trumps-melian-dialogue
