To understand the world today, read Thucydides

(Bloomberg opinion) – In 416 BCE, a powerful army of Athens, the superpower of the time, appeared on the small neutral island of Melos in the Aegean Sea. The Athenians told the Melians to submit and pay homage or be wiped out. Dumbfounded, the Melians appealed to morality, justice, law, even the gods. There was a misunderstanding, the Athenians replied: You just have the choice between doing what you said and being destroyed, so please stop wasting our time. It is not fair, the Melians insist.

Thus, the Athenians put to death all the adult men whom they took away, and sold the women and children for slaves, and then sent five hundred settlers and inhabited the place themselves.

With this last sentence, perhaps the most twisted in world literature, the Greek historian Thucydides concludes the Melian dialogue in his History of the Peloponnesian War. (I have abbreviated the dialog here, the full version is here.) The text is a classic of international relations and a good guide to understanding our world today.

It is because it was the first expression of two traditions that have crossed world politics since. The Athenian mentality described by Thucydides is called realism. He views the world as a scene organized only by power and self-interest. Could do it right.

The Melian approach is called idealism. This tradition has not always been as weak as the Melians. It has become over time the concept of international law, as it was later embodied, for example, in the United Nations and in the European Union. Here the rules are said to take precedence over or at least temper power to protect the weak from the strong for the ultimate benefit of all.

The western world after World War II was largely shaped in an architecture that the Melians would have admired. One big reason was that it was led by a superpower, the United States, which was realistic in its military preparation but idealistic in its vision and values. The UN has defended legalism and conflict resolution without war. Other institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the current forerunner of the World Trade Organization, have reported that rules exist to restrict naked power in world affairs.

No one has embraced this Melian mentality with as much enthusiasm as Europeans traumatized by the war, and in particular the Germans, who had only recently committed a genocide that the Athenians would not have couldn't imagine. Rhetorically, the Germans have given up harsh power and self-interest, which is one of the reasons they disdain and underfund their own army.

For more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, idealism seemed to be the future. Some writers celebrated the end of history while the liberal international order reigned. Many were particularly enthusiastic about the EU, the pinnacle of legalistic and post-national multilateralism, predicting that Europe will run the 21st century, that the European way is the best hope and that the EU will become the new superpower.

What happened instead was a brutal turn away from idealism and a return to realism. Certain ancient but modern powers, such as post-Soviet Russia, post-Ottoman Turkey and post-imperial China, sometimes felt rejected or humiliated by the West and its idealistic dogma. Newly ascending (China) or newly affirmed (Russia and Turkey), they are now arch-realists.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and annexed Crimea in 2014, for example, he did so with the mentality of the Athenians of Melos, not caring at all that he violated international law. After all, who was going to stop him? When Putin's warplanes drop bombs over Syria to help boyfriend Bashar al-Assad, he views humans down with Athenian disdain, turning millions into refugees who he hopes will go in the EU to cause chaos.

It is with the same grim realism that Chinese President Xi Jinping sees his neighborhood. Where it can assert its power and get away with it, it will do so, for example, by taking a few islets in the South China Sea to make them Chinese aircraft carriers. Where he calculates that his power is not yet sufficient or could cause an (even) greater force like the United States, he waits, like in Taiwan.

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