A quick addendum to my previous post; it was reassuring to hear that Thucydides has indeed started to be cited in the context of the Ukraine and Crimea, in a letter to the Financial Times published in Wednesday from the former British ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton. Final paragraph:
It will be argued that big states no longer decide the destinies of small states in this way, and that Russia’s action is a throwback to a now extinct era of “hard power”. I’m afraid it has always been a fond delusion that great power politics today operate any differently from in all previous times. Thucydides is still right.
Melian Dialogue revealing fundamental and universal principles of human existence, check. Thucydides as the pitiless, illusion-free analyst of the way things really are, rather than the way we wish they were, check. Thucydides as a stick with which to beat the optimistic “this time it’s different” brigade, check. All we need now is someone to point out what happened next; is Russia about to embark on its own Sicilian Expedition, drunk with the hubris exhibited in its treatment of the Ukrainians?
Incidentally, I was asked, after I’d mentioned this letter at the close of the recent Warburg conference on The Afterlife of Herodotus and Thucydides (on which I really ought to blog if I can find any time), why I found it reassuring that this letter had appeared. Not, I should stress, because I think we all ought to be discussing Thucydides at this time, but simply because it confirmed my predication. IR people (and, clearly, ambassadors) being what they are, Thucydides’ account will be found to be relevant and useful in more or less any historical situation in the future…
Sphinx 
Ooh, and another one! I was contacted by a reader (Mitch Kochanski) asking if I had a full copy of the letter by Brenton; unfortunately not, and the Financial Times lurks behind a paywall, but a Google search did throw up another example of the Thucydides-Crimea connection, following pretty well exactly the same pattern but this time from a US source: Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post:
“Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history, and Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin’s is ‘really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century.’
“This must mean that seeking national power, territory, dominion — the driving impulse of nations since Thucydides — is obsolete. As if a calendar change caused a revolution in human nature that transformed the international arena from a Hobbesian struggle for power into a gentleman’s club where violations of territorial integrity just don’t happen.
“’That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior,’ says Kerry. Makes invasion sound like a breach of etiquette — like using the wrong fork at a Beacon Hill dinner party.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-obamas-inaction-enables-putins-grab-for-ukraine/2014/03/06/c4222690-a55f-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html
Okay, it’s a bit pedantic to criticise hastily-written op ed pieces for loose phrasing, but there’s an interesting ambiguity as to whether Thucydides was the first to recognise the universal drive to national aggrandisement (not exactly what Th actually says, of course) or whether it is since Thucydides that nations have had such a driving impulse. Still serves the same basic agenda: nothing changes in international relations, and it’s wishy-washy liberal idealism to imagine that it ever will; this is the way the world really works…
And now a German example, from Josef Joffe in this week’s Die Zeit – though to be fair, he is here characterising the ‘Ultra-Realist’ attitude towards Russia, rather than offering this as his own argument:
‘He speaks amorally and therefore fairly candidly. He takes pains with the maps, the power relations and costs, the lack of leadership of the West and sums it up soberly: we can’t do anything. This is ‘Realo-Appeasement’. Only scarcely anyone today uses the ice-cold language which the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War employed: ‘The strong do what they can, the weak what they must’.’
Wonder if that misquotation is significant or not…
A quick addendum on the addendum: @qqiliHq (who first alerted me to this piece – I’ve only just started reading this week’s issue) notes that Joffe charactises himself as a Realist, and adopts the term ‘Ultra-Realist’ because he doesn’t want to be seen as a ‘Putinversteher’. In which case it becomes quite plausible that he *would* actually sign up to the evocation of Thucydides, and is objecting here to the fact that these writers aren’t willing to be so open and realistic about the real state of things (which would fit with his criticisms of other ways of ‘understanding’ Russia’s actions). Note that Th is evoked again a bit further on in the article, under ‘The Cosi fan tutte Choir’: “Yes, great powers quite happily act like the Athenians” – which could, Joffe suggests, lead to a serious discussion of the legitimate spheres of influence of all the different great powers, but in fact is not pursued according to a real-politik principle.
At which point it becomes increasingly plausible that for Joffe ‘the weak’ in his Thucydides misquote are not the Ukrainians but the Western powers, busy finding as many reasons as possible to justify their inaction rather than admitting to their impotence.
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