Listen, I don’t spend my time concocting spurious parallels between ancient history and contemporary events so that I can indoctrinate my students and subvert society under the guise of teaching. I open up my copy of Thucydides to prepare for this week’s seminar, the topic of which was set three months ago, and there parallels are…
Thucydides on stasis – the collapse of society and collective values under the pressure of factionalism, a text which has spoken to successive periods of history from the warring city states of Renaissance Italy to the English Civil War (Thomas Hobbes!) to the French Revolution (Edmund Burke):
Their factions were not dedicated to collective well-being under established laws but to undermining the law for their own selfish advantage. The strength of their bonds with one another were less a matter of trust and friendship than on their common involvement in a criminal cause. If their opponents made reasonable proposals, they responded, when they felt themselves in a position of strength, with defensive counter-measures rather than generously accepting them. To get revenge on someone mattered more than not being hurt in the first place. If they ever agreed on reconciliation, this was only considered binding for the time being, as each side only agreed to reconcile with its opponents when they felt they had no other option and no other source of power; but when the opportunity arose, each sought to strike first…
The less intelligent were the ones who often came out on top. They were afraid that, because of their own shortcomings and the cleverness of their opponents, they might be defeated in any rational argument and be caught unawares by plans being hatched against them. They therefore committed themselves boldly to action, while those who complacently assumed that they could foresee developments in advance, so there was no need to secure by action what would be attained through proper analysis of the situation – they were taken off-guard and destroyed.
(Thucydides 3.82.6-7, 3.83.3-4, adapted from Mynott)
Anyway, most of the time it’s the students coming up with these comparisons, not me…
Sphinx 
The need to appear a man of action is a burden that hangs around every President. In the war on terror, immediate action trumps patient investigation. In its planned operations, the FBI can spend more time scoping out a house before infiltration than the American people are willing to wait for operations that rise to their attention. Our War on Terror is ten times more expensive than it has to be, because politicians demand action NOW instead of letting our intelligence agencies play the long, smart game.
But for the record, my favorite parallel is between the American invasion of Iraq and the Athenian invasion of Sicily.
A fortiori when the ‘war on terror’ becomes a means of pursuing factional advantage: mobilising one’s base, castigating opponents as weak and compromised.
The remarkable thing about the Iraq/Sicily parallel is that this was discussed at the time, given the neocons’ love of Thucydides; there’s a case to be made that much of Donald Kagan’s late period interpretation of Thucydides was dedicated to proving that he was wrong and the invasion of Sicily could have worked.
For me the question is whether factionalism, as described by T, does not by nature become a kind of Darwinian arms race, once it takes hold. I not only see this dynamic in the US, I feel it: I find myself spending more mental energy on how we might destroy the opposing faction than on how we might come to agreement for the public good. And i do this because i feel the other side is doing it. “No other option”, as T says. Guelph? Ghibelline? C’est moi.
I think that’s absolutely right – if you read the whole passage, not just extracts, the whole thing rolls on inexorably, and it’s not clear how it can possibly end before one side wipes out the other, because each side knows that the other side is planning to do the same. He’s very good on the mentality of paranoia and desperate pre-emption.