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The lesson was supposedly about bi-polar superpower politics, and the wrong team won. Several of my professors praised it, although never assigning it, in class. This proved to be quite a trick for an undergraduate at a small rural college, miles from a real bookstore in pre-Amazon. It was the very first academic monograph I ever purchased. In that regard, it was a significant marker in my life. When you are buying commentaries on ancient texts with the beer money, it likely means that law school is growing less attractive and graduate school is in the near future. I did not know what I was getting myself into. Whatever insights it implanted in my mind were of a narrow sort, so that I remembered the book for a good general treatment of how the parts of the Peloponnesian War fit together and a useful overview of previous scholarship. I put it away, maybe looked at specific sections a couple of times in grad school, and worked on other topics. I could not say for sure that I ever opened it in Maine, but I carried it with me there and back again so that it could sit on my shelf as a badge of my trade and so that I could have it close at hand should its use be called for. This essay is a review of sorts. My re-reading of Forde nearly coincided with my reading of an article by Ruth Grant on the purpose of political thought. I was impressed by her clarity in arguing that we should not become confused about what we are doing in liberal-arts scholarship. We are not simply, or even predominantly, trying to discover new knowledge that goes into a great book of wisdom where universal and eternal principles are inscribed. Our best essays share little with the write-ups of geneticists who run tests in controlled environments and who pronounce definitively that gene X and protein Y controls development of Z. Instead she argues that, by engaging in the scholarly study of political theorists, we are teaching ourselves to exercise enlightened judgment in the world we are given: assuredly an uncontrolled environment. We should read old, deep, complicated books in light of new conditions because they can help us understand our own times from new perspectives that we might otherwise neglect. In doing so, we learn how to judge our problems. If we do not read the old books, we too seldom learn judgment; but if we do not read the newspapers, we have nothing to judge. As I read the newspapers in the fall of in the long shadow of the previous September 11, amid what seemed to me to be the slow-motion train crash of the run-up to the U. It occurred to me that that these echoes might suggest some problematic long-term consequences for our democratic polity. So why is a reading of Thucydides so important in these days? We must recognize that Thucydides has become a significant and contested resource; he has been cited repeatedly over the last sixty years to justify significant claims in foreign policy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, whenever we get a new war, we get a new Thucydides. Three different interpretations of Thucydides, one historical and two more current, are in play here. First, as I and many others have already suggested, the view of the Peloponnesian War as a precursor for the Cold War exercised clear power for nearly fifty years. Similarly Daniel Mendelsohn draws attention to the ways that Kagan, likely our most eminent Thucydidean historian, has fashioned his new one volume history as a revisionist defense of the Athenian hawks. I want to offer a third reading of Thucydides, as explicitly relevant for our times. I do so hesitantly. I am less persuaded than Hanson and Kagan that we can easily mine historians of the past for axioms directly applicable to the present. Equally, though, we must not cede the field to those who would make of his work a simple call to aggressive war. If those who see in Thucydides numerous suggestions of current dangers more deep and disturbing than any immediately apparent go unchallenged, we can lose the wisdom that Thucydides might offer. We also can lose a powerful tool, both theoretical and rhetorical, for reconsidering our present position. I would not be read to say that, just because something happened to Athens, it must happen to the U. Instead I would pursue a different way to learn from Thucydides. But let me begin by offering a few suggestions about ways in which our situation might be closely analogous to that of the Athenians at the outset of the Peloponnesian War. Without undertaking a full-scale content analysis, there is plenty of reason to think that we are talking more and more about ourselves as an empire or as a nation seen by others as an empire. As eminent a scholar as Joseph Nye has argued that the U. His is a fairly narrow definition, however, and we certainly look like an empire in the Athenian sense. Our troops are quartered in more than countries all over the world. We placed them there in the aftermath of World War II, when we completed a war as the most powerful leader of an alliance against a totalitarian aggressor, Nazi Germany. Today we find ourselves still occupying military posts in far-flung countries, even though the Soviet Union has collapsed. Russia may be a threat, but seems much less powerful and imminently aggressive. We could now place ourselves in the familiar Athenian role, but the Russians ought to be re-considered in the role of the Persians. We maintain these even though the threat that necessitated them has now receded. We should not be surprised that some of our allies, who once welcomed us as protectors, have come to see us as occupiers. Like the Athenians, we exercise military superiority over nations who once viewed our military as the bulwark of their freedom and now view it as an impediment to that freedom. Their interpretations of our military commitments, as well as their attitudes towards us, have changed accordingly. The analogy does not offer a clear antagonist to take the role of Sparta, but this fact does not entirely undermine the value of the parallel. We might be in the odd position of having to create a Sparta in order to justify our role as Athens. It is an illusory monolith characterized by its oligarchic, theocratic Islamic type only , and reactionary resistance to American democracy. In a major foreign policy speech at the U. On this basis, we can connect our aggressive reaction to the terrorism to the hesitance that has begun to mark even our allies, the U. We might infer that our terrorist enemies and our hesitant friends have similar apprehensions. Any nation intent on preserving its identity and its autonomy has reason to wonder whether it can be itself in a world so dominated by the American presence. Today they are regularly the topic of popular publications, and the idea that Straussians in the administration master-mind current policy is now cited as accepted wisdom. As a student of political theory who was educated in the Straussian tradition and whose thinking about recent events stems from re-reading Thucydides, I can add that connecting current issues about imperial strategy to intellectual considerations associated with Strauss re-confirms a sense that Thucydides is important for us now. This teaching can be found, as much as anywhere, in Straussian commentaries on Thucydides. Clifford Orwin takes this approach in The Humanity of Thucydides Orwin argues that such questions have both theoretical and practical importance. The theoretical issue is fundamental for understanding the theoretic essence of political life: Was Machiavelli correct to argue that the rule of force is the only rule that matters for politics? Yet the narrative by Thucydides never loses sight of practical implications. Ever the political historian, he was acutely aware of tensions like those that the war on terrorism brings forcefully to our attention: Are democracies devoted to freedom ideologically incapable of such imperial requirements as the willingness to exercise domination? Freedom and empire : we say these two words together time and again because they are strange antonyms in a strict way but potential synonyms in a looser sense. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. Thus to treat expansion of freedom as coeval with domination of the Other is to make them synonyms. Are these flip sides of the same coin? There are deeper, rhetorical levels to the problem. Beyond this theoretical question, statesmen who accept such views face rhetorical challenges: How can they persuade people who might not share a Machiavellian view of the world to take actions required to protect themselves in precarious environments? Democracies may be hesitant to adopt imperial projects, especially when it calls for citizens to fight and die. Lapham concludes that politicians must tell Americans lies, and he is certainly correct that it requires telling them something. But what rhetoric does it require? Again there is reason to think that Thucydides might help us understand our own position and our own possibilities better than other thinkers, even more current ones. Had they no rhetorical power, the war might have happened differently or not at all. The similarities are striking. One argues that the empire is necessary for security, compelling Athenians to defend it. The outcome of the History suggests that any Athenian choices of empire prove open to weighty objections. The analysis can take advantage of our emotions being less inflamed by the older speeches even as we know more about their outcomes. The next two sections explore the two explicit explanations of the Athenian empire offered by Athenians in speeches that Thucydides composed for the History. I use these discussions to trace echoes in current American rhetoric. Yet the telling commonalities reinforce the suggestion that the United States might be caught in an imperial trap. What should Americans now guard against in imperial power and the two rhetorics that would justify it for a democracy? The History offers no blueprint for action by the United States or prediction of its futures. But it does help identify troubles with the recurrent rhetorics advanced so far to support an imperial policy of preemptive war. Alert readers of Thucydides might object that Pericles was arguing for Athenian restraint in not seeking new foreign conquests. Forde insists that the Funeral Oration argument is prudent but nevertheless imperial. Insofar as we Americans are in the early stages of what leaders say is a long-term war to defend of an imperial position, a war that may require extending our reach to defend what we have, we are in a position somewhat analogous to that of ancient Athens. No doubt there are some important differences. But if we are living the logic that Forde identifies in the early speeches of Pericles, and if Forde is right that this logic led the Athenians to defeat, we do well to recognize sooner rather than later the dangerous position that we share with the Athenians. Among the Straussian commentators on Thucydides, Forde and Orwin, in particular, read the Peloponnesian War with American concerns in mind. Both stress the internal corruption that empire can work on democracy. Forde demonstrates how imperial rhetoric prepares Athenian culture for the rise of Alcibiades, the reckless political and military genius who dominated and betrayed Athens in the last ten years of the Peloponnesian War. As much as it may be said that Straussians are infatuated with Alcibiades, it is much harder to argue that they approve of him or the political developments that produce such characters. At times, Forde seems to argue that the Athenians might have prevailed in Sicily if they had not alienated Alcibiabes, but this need not mean that Athens would have been better as a result or that such a victory would have been good for the Athenian regime. Forde focuses on Alcibiades as the most conspicuous example and symbol of the corruption that empire inflicts on Athens. According to Forde, Thucydides wanted readers to recognize Alcibiades as a symptom of the dangers in empire. Forde emphasizes the incompatibility of Alcibiades with a healthy regime in Athens. The relationship can become a contrapuntal dance where political leaders draw first on one argument then on the other. The shifts might meet political exigencies in the short term, yet they also might introduce dissonances that undermine specific policies or even entire democracies in the longer run. The positive case for democratic empire seems more suited to beginning a war. To be sure, there are differences of note. Many relate to contrasts in setting and form. As a public eulogy for those fallen in war, the Pericles speech directly addresses questions of sacrifice. President Bush has yet to deliver a major speech on such an occasion; nor has he been willing to talk much, let alone directly, about American war deaths, particularly in Iraq. His public statements make vague references to the sacrifices of our military personnel, sometimes conflating the inconvenience of time away from home with the loss of loved ones killed. On that occasion, Bush has told brief anecdotes about soldiers killed in Iraq, but he has added little to justify their dying. Still there are striking similarities between the Bush speech to the NED and the Pericles Funeral Oration in construction, imagery, argument, and purpose. The two speeches share key features of structure. Both open with arguments that the Athenian or American people are contributing forms of government that enhance the world. By implication, they would be wrong to resist the change that his United States is now introducing. As Thucydides had Pericles say of the Athenians, Bush holds that Americans are powerful precisely because we are free. The full expression of this freedom will result in the greatest power, unlike any the world has seen before. After proceeding in parallel with the Funeral Oration throughout much of the body, the NED speech turn away near its peroration. Even if this power of Athens could have some transcendent or universal appeal, Pericles sells it as peculiarly Athenian. If democracy is exportable, Pericles celebrates the claims of Athens to being its author, its greatest prophet and its foremost symbol. By comparison, the American invocation of freedom may seem more noble, more generous, and less dangerous. President Bush appears to be less parochial in his offer to the world. We should not be too eager, however, to think that America avoids the narcissism of Athens in this positive statement of the case for imperial democracy. The American account never faces the conflict in its call for a general triumph of freedom and its suggestion of continuing leadership by America. Is this a defect? I doubt that any broadly preemptive foreign policy can be sustained without such a parochial premise. What remains is the ideal of dying for freedom as part of a higher, encompassing cause that includes others as well as oneself. The patriotic call is to die for a country that enjoys its distinctive freedom even after the personal sacrifice of its successful defenders. Arriving in Baghdad for what turned out to be brief service as the head of Iraqi reconstruction, Lt. General Jay Garner emphasized the special boldness produced by a sense of patriotic purpose. To sustain public support for wars likely to be long-term where immediate physical survival of the country is not obviously at risk, public appeals must take on a particularly powerful, even hyperbolic, intensity. It is often noted that the sense of optimism and purpose in the Funeral Oration sets up readers for a stunning reversal. Sara Monoson and Michael Loriaux explain how this shift in emphasis should temper our enthusiasm for the patriotic call of Pericles. Thucydides followed the Pericles call for public-spirited action with the dual tragedy of Sparta invading Athens while plague assaulted the Athenians trapped within their city walls. The Funeral Oration urged Athenians to engage in the most selfless patriotic behavior, but the sense of doom that followed military retreat and death from disease made the Athenians preternaturally insecure and self-absorbed. Any sense of public spiritedness is likely to be short-lived among individuals under the threat of imminent death. In a democracy, widespread pessimism whether caused by foreign-policy failure, economic downturn, or even natural disaster can disarm political commitments. The NED speech came near the end of a long period of confidence, shortly before excitement surrounding the capture of Saddam Hussein marked one of the last major upswings in optimism about the war in Iraq. Since late , public opinion on the war has moved mostly downward. If Americans have not experienced the stunning reversal, the utter collapse, that struck the Athenians in the summer of , the possibility of such a turn lurks in only one terrorist attack on American soil or a truly terrible defeat in Iraq: An attack that took massive casualties, something akin to the Beiruit bombing of Marine barracks in , could easily turn lurking unease about the occupation into widespread public outrage and hostility. Vulnerability to such abrupt shifts is an enduring trouble for any democracy that would maintain an imperial policy. The percentages who thought that the U. From the beginning of to the middle of , at least one in three Americans surveyed changed their minds at least once about Iraq. Such fluctuations are not surprising. Thucydides knew to expect them for Athens; pollsters know to expect them for America. However, the former recognized that these swings in public confidence made imperial policies nearly unsustainable over the long-term. It is not at all clear that our leaders recognize the dangers that they pose on our current course. Thucydides traces how fluctuating confidence made it increasingly difficult for Athenian leaders to maintain their policy of preemptive imperialism. He shows how hawkish leaders anxious to play offensive strategy to the hilt were driven to ever more extravagant rhetoric in trying to hold citizens on course. Yet their hyperbolic efforts to construct stable grounds for agreement on empire proved futile, and, in the readings of Forde, White, Orwin, and others, it is this collapse of public agreement that ultimately undermined the very basis of Athenian democracy. Even the relatively moderate rhetoric of Pericles contributed to setting the stage for the later reversals suffered by Athens. So even it had to go. When Athenians seemed least inclined to imperial policy, Thucydides presents Pericles as employing a rhetoric of fear. It stresses the costs of abandoning empire. In pointing to the dangers that Athenians face, though, it also speaks openly for the first time about the magnitude of Athenian power Forde , pp. In his last speech, Pericles argued that Athenians have never before appreciated the great extent of their powers, especially their naval power 2. Thus this speech combined a new, more forceful, even boastful, declaration of Athenian invincibility with a new, more negative, specifically frightening account of risks run by Athenians if they fail to contribute fully to the public good: for then they cannot make full use of their powers in the face of grave dangers. Elements of this odd juxtaposition have re-surfaced in some speeches by President Bush. The momentum of freedom in our time is strong, but we still face serious dangers. Al Qaeda is wounded, but not broken. Terrorists continue to attack in Afghanistan and Iraq; regimes in North Korea and Iran are challenging the peace. If America shows weakness or uncertainty in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. We know the terrorists want to strike the United States again, to spread fear and disrupt our way of life. Critics of Bush policy have said repeatedly that fear-mongering has become its main defense. Anne Norton , pp. The language of fear and danger does intensify in Bush speeches as public support for imperial policies becomes less stable. Like Pericles, however, Bush tempers his expressions of fear and difficulty with a confident emphasis on American strength and a conviction of ultimate victory. The trouble is that this shifts the foundation for action from freedom and democracy to power. In the first Pericles address, Forde argues, there is a paradoxical restraint on the most imperialist impulses. Even when successful, this rhetoric unfortunately tended to replace the earlier sense that Athens was a world leader because of its politics with the starker suggestion that Athens was a world leader because of its power. It also followed the Pericles strategy of absorbing opponents and doubters into an amorphous form of collective responsibility. Likewise a leading line in the stump speech reminded audiences that both Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards had voted for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq see Balz America must be imminently endangered but preeminently strong. There must always be light at the end of the tunnel, however long. Bush forgot that for an unscripted moment. And yet if the situation is dire and still the outcome, provided that we stay the course, is inevitable, this rhetoric inevitably casts domestic opponents to the reigning imperialist policy as the real enemies of the state. The current administration is guilty of ignoring the real costs, both financial and rhetorical, that we are paying to maintain the war on terrorism. Still conflicts over the long-term compatibility of democracy and empire will have consequences, even if they stay submerged or receive less explicit attention in America. For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny. The logic is chilling. Thucydides had Pericles admit what we will not: that vigorous exercise of a preemptive, imperial policy continually raises the stakes for abandoning that policy. Most supporters of the policy, like President Bush, insist that there is no tie between our actions in support of the policy and the escalating risks that we run. It is a ridiculous notion to assert that, because the United States is on the offense, more people want to hurt us. Some people would want to attack the United States regardless of its policies. White , pp. Forde maintains that the Athenians eventually find themselves trapped in their imperial policy, unable to sustain it or to let it go. Failing even to see the imperial trap for democracies seems a real possibility for us, given the optimism of Bush rhetoric, and it might intensify our dangers. We can see these problems emerging in the persistent American confusion in the face of foreign resistance to our plans. We seem at a loss when confronted by others who are not immediately persuaded by the stories we tell ourselves. We should pay careful attention to those places in the Peloponnesian War in which Thucydides shows Athenians following the domestic example of Pericles to justify their empire for foreign audiences on grounds of fear. The usual results were unhappy Forde , pp. The first Athenian visit to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War came at the invitation of Camarina, who wanted Athens to oppose Syracuse. But when Athenians came back in , they faced an unexpected debate with the Syracusans to win support from Camarina. Since Camarinans had warred against Syracuse in the past, Euphemus held that they should not distrust the Athenians, who would renew that war 6. This amoral vindication spurred Camarinans to fear that the Athenians would subjugate Sicily. In spite of earlier sympathy with the Athenians, once they had heard Euphemus explain the grounds of Athenian action in terms that might be well-suited to marshalling domestic support for a war in Sicily but that could not persuade Sicilians that Athens was not coming to stay, the Camarinans decided to play both sides, offering help to Syracuse as well as Athens 6. It reveals how the early, restrained, seemingly moderate rhetoric by Pericles for democratic empire provided a basis for the more aggressive rhetoric adopted by Athenians later in the war. First, in democracies, domestic politics confound foreign policies. Thus shifts in public moods require shifting rhetorical strategies like those of Pericles or Bush, and these shifts, in turn, stay open to manipulation by outsiders who try to turn internal politics to their own advantage. Second, imperial foreign policies disaggregate private and public goods, forcing people to choose between them. This tends in turn to undermine the sense of political cohesion needed for domestic tranquility as well as foreign perseverance. In democracies, domestic politics always distort the presentation of foreign policies. Some might think this point too obvious to mention. Others dismiss it or argue that we should be able to rise above it. The Thucydidean account of Athens demonstrates the problems with failing to take it seriously. Egesta was a city in Sicily allied with Athens. In bce, Egesta sent envoys to Athens asking for help against their neighbors and enemies, the Syracusans. The Egestans knew that the Athenians feared a Spartan attack, and insisted that, if Athens did not help by destroying the Egestan enemies, including the powerful city of Syracuse, the Syracusans would win in Sicily then join Sparta in destroying the Athenian empire 6. By saying that Athenian help in Sicily was necessary to keep Athens secure, the Egestans explicitly framed their request in terms of the purpose cited by Athenians for their empire, thus using Athenian rhetoric to pull Athens into another far-away fray. Open processes for policymaking invite any foreign power to play the domestic politics of democracies to its own advantage. Thucydides illustrates the intractability of this problem by emphasizing two claims that the Egestans made in order to secure Athenian aid. Second, they said that the other cities of Sicily were internally divided and thus likely to fall with the lightest of pushes. It was misled by clever manipulation and its own hopes of spoils from a Sicilian invasion. The Athenians were not entirely uncritical, but available evidence could neither confirm nor rebut these claims. As a result, the Athenians soon divided into competing parties based on their pre-existing inclinations. Each side interpreted the inadequate evidence based on its own presuppositions. The recent choices about projecting American power have proceeded along similar lines. Those inclined to war focused on evidence that the threat was great and immediate, and that the war would be easy and cheap. Those less inclined to foreign adventures assumed the opposite. As citizens, none of us knew whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or plans to use them. In a democracy, even so, we citizens have to make decisions about matters that we cannot evaluate independently. It is neither surprising nor irresponsible that we tend to follow our pre-existing politics as we do so. Cognitive economy leads us to treat inconclusive evidence as supporting our preferred positions. Most so-called foreign intelligence, in ancient Athenian and modern America, is created and assessed mainly for its impact on the political balance of power at home. Political considerations generally dictate which stimuli enter domestic politics, whether from friends at home or enemies abroad. We interpret foreign events mainly by their meanings for political parties and political issues at home. As a result, shifting opinions of publics necessitate shifting rhetorics from leaders, and these dominate foreign as well as domestic policies in democracies. It is punctuated by sharp shifts between Athenian heights of power or enthusiasm and Athenian depths of fear, confusion, or self-doubt. Often the changes are abrupt. Discussing such erratic politics, Forde shows how, over the course of the History , the periods between mood fluctuations shrink until the Athenians appear to be in perpetual vibration between a bold disregard for danger and the opinion of others and a near paranoia about the intentions of domestic friends and foreign adversaries alike. Attempts to construct and maintain the popular agreement necessary for stable policy pose the greatest threats to preconditions for democracy. Intensified appeals to a unique national character may sustain for a time a sense of the special significance of our freedom, to ennoble sacrifices offered for our greatness, but they can diminish the ideal that freedom matters for others. As the war proceeds, practical and imperial considerations are confounded, and they overwhelm others until eventually the Athenians vote away their democracy to create an oligarchy claiming it may impose the discipline needed to conduct the war successfully. The imperial policy inverted means and ends. The war urged as necessary to save democracy in Athens ultimately results in Athenian rejection of democracy in order to win the war. This sobering account of ancient Athens may not be a perfect match for modern America, yet it yields points of reference for making inferences about how rhetorics for current policies may impact American ideas and institutions. Many commentators say that challenges of the war on terrorism differ from any in American history, but few can say what this might mean for America in the long run. This trajectory, which may be as evident in America today as in Athens in the early stages of the war, is one that we should not dismiss out of hand. Oligarchy offers the discipline required for the victory needed to protect the polity. So the installation of the oligarchy appears, at first, as a reasonable and necessary measure. In presenting it in this way, the History puts its readers in the position of Athenians who, feeling the pressure of a war going wrong, change their form of government to gain the right leadership for winning the war. Yet Forde also shows how Thucydides revealed the corruption of these talented and well-educated people. They first took power because they believed that their talents, particularly their political realism and their ability to stay the course, were needed to save Athens. In time, their self-interests diverged from requirements of the public good. We would do well to view the two speeches of Pericles already discussed plus their American cognates in the context of a third speech for which I know no American parallel. It is the speech of an otherwise unknown character: Diodotus, son of Eucrates. After the submission of Mytilene, once a leading ally of Athens, the assembly voted to kill all Mytilenians to warn that Athens is not to be trifled with. After a day to reflect on this, Athenians were seized with remorse and met to soften their stance. To understand Diodotus requires an appreciation of the unique dilemmas that he faced in speaking after Cleon. Cleon upbraided Athenians in the harshest terms, insisting that they must hold the line and impose the full penalty on the Mytilenians. Even though justice might require mercy, Cleon argued that Athenians, threatened by the defection of allies in a dangerous world, must follow self-interest. They must send a message that the wrath of Athens would be ruinous to rebels. No one, he reasoned, should doubt the resolve of Athens, and its actions must make that clear to all. Thus he put his opponents in a difficult, if not impossible, position: if they spoke against offensive measures, they risked being seen as enemy sympathizers. The Athenians were utterly transformed by their own rhetoric into believing that security only exists in power and that all increases in power are increases in security. Hence it marks a turning point for the imperial democracy of Athens, as seen by Thucydides, with discussion eventually replaced altogether by civil war as the modus operandi of Athenian policymaking. Athenian democracy became a casualty of its own imperial strategy for self-defense. Some of the harshest instances of such framing measures have succeeded. Saxby Chambliss unseated U. Senator Max Cleland with a campaign that pictured Cleland with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while associating Cleland with opposition to the homeland-security bill that he has, in truth, helped author. These ads cast dissent as treason and undermined the possibility for any constructive reconsideration of policies. Thucydides showed that such rhetoric comes from nearly endless, preemptive, imperial wars. Courtesy of Cleon, any counsel of restraint that Diodotus might have wanted to offer, had already been cast as treason. This made all the more remarkable his ability to restrain the passions of Athenians. He appealed openly and effectively to qualities that had been the pride of Athenians: their strength, realism, and willingness to endure risks to advance their interests. Facing the possibility that any focus on justice had been foreclosed by Cleon, with any solicitude for the Mytilenians now treated as treason, Diodotus prudently announced that he would set aside all claims of justice to speak only about Athenian interests. As the plain provider of good advice, he engaged the angry passions incited by Cleon by appealing to them. He rejected the relevance of justice, insisting that the only true measure of policy must be Athenian self-interest. He held that the Athenians should show no scruple about using force to advance their interests, but he added that they should avoid offensive actions that undermine Athenian security 3. Among major Athenian speakers in the History , only Diodotus reconciled all the ideas and passions that drove the Athenians. For the moment, at least, he synthesized the strength of Athens with its decency or gentleness. Diodotus succeeded in identifying his view with that of ordinary Athenians. By this route, he persuaded them to adopt, however briefly, a perspective apart from patriotism. Advising Athenians on their interests, Diodotus reminded them that the Mytilenians especially the ones who did not begin the rebellion against Athens but joined in trying to save their city once Athens placed it under siege were essentially like the Athenians. Thus Diodotus forged an elegant, if fragile, consensus for justice. He constructed this public commitment under the guise of self-interest to undermine the dangerous effects of jingoistic rhetoric in the Funeral Oration, to sate fears aroused by the darker, final speech of Pericles, and to sidestep the trap imposed by Cleon. This example might be cited to suggest that contemporary anti-war activists fail to persuade most Americans in part because they are not as clever as Diodotus. A rhetoric that begins by denouncing the injustice of American policy is doomed to failure. Yet this approach licensed Athenians to indulge their most self-interested impulses. The irony is that Diodotus averted one potential Melos only to endorse rhetoric that led straight to more. The Diodotus case is complicated. Successful advocacy against any counter-productive aggression in defense of a democracy requires a tone of realism, but it also demands an effective appeal to sentiments of justice, however submerged they might seem in the popular conscience. For us, this requires some echo for the familiar charge that current opposition to the U. Diodotus echoed popular equivalents that animated the Athenians. Arguments for restraint must not offend our pride in our realism and resolution. Still we must recognize that such rhetoric stays problematic because it reinforces principles that can have disastrous consequences when enacted by people who pride themselves on being hard. Rhetorics of self-interested realism are difficult even for democracies to stop short of imperial domination. There are many differences between ourselves and ancient Athenians. Given that we are the first nation of imperial might that is explicitly or ostensibly devoted to a natural rights philosophy, we might think that our future history will provide the first accurate data on that question. That said, the contrapuntal dance between fear and power, or danger and destiny, keeps us in the rhetorical realm of Thucydides. Perhaps they can tell us how to address our legitimate fears while tempering our enormous powers. Perhaps we can heed their appeals to show justice and gentleness toward others. He showed how the fear and envy of others but especially their own ambition and aggression undid their democracy and their empire. What is constant, he said, is human nature; but within that constraint, he held that many variations on human themes may occur. It is vain to trust that we are somehow better human beings than those Thucydides depicts in the Athenian assembly. But Thucydides can help us learn from them. From the History , we can learn about the short-sighted decisions that appear inevitable to those held hostage by the categories that they use to justify their own imperial policies. We can learn about losing the individual liberty and self-actualization that have provided for our self-confident action in the world. We can learn about the political pitfalls that lurk in adopting a partial and self-serving realism as the idiom of our political rhetoric and the justification for our political actions. Our judgment, the intellectual capacity most cultivated by education in the liberal arts, can be educated by the Athens of Thucydides. As political theorists we must put our training and our traditions to work in crafting a rhetoric that can undo the logic that now leads America from democracy to empire and, all too possibly, disaster. For purposes of this article, I have limited myself to speeches delivered before the November election. Speeches that are directly alluded to in this essay include two State of the Union Addresses and ; the speech to the National Endowment of Democracy November ; remarks at the presidential press conference April, ; and recent speeches from the foreign policy series of summer including remarks at the Army War College May, , Commencement Ceremonies for the U. Balz, Dan. Bruell, Christopher. Cockburn, Alexander, and Jeffrey St. Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia. London: Verso. Cogan, Marc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connor, W. Corsi, Jerome R. Danner, Mark. Dowd, Maureen. November 23, p. Ferguson, Niall. New York: Penguin. Forde, Steven. Grant, Ruth. Hersh, Seymour. Hoffman, Stanley. Johnson, Chalmers A. New York: Metropolian Books. Judis, John B. The Folly of Empire. New York: Scribner. Kristof, Nicholas. January 7, A Lapham, Lewis. Mendelsohn, Daniel. Monoson, S. Sara and Michael Loriaux. Norton, Anne. Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Orwin, Clifford. The Humanity of Thucydides. Safire, William. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. Shorris, Earl. Soros, George. Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1st edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. The Landmark Thucydides , Robert B. Strassler, ed. New York: Simon and Schuster. Vidal, Gore. New York: Nation Books. West, Thomas. White, James Boyd. When Words Lose their Meanings. Will, George. Wolin, Sheldon. Xenos, Nicholas. Leo Strauss and American Foreign Policy. New York: Routledge. True, but this would defeat my purpose. In Thucydides, we see how a public debate about the necessity of empire can occur in a more or less democratic environment. I want us to see that debate as a factor contributing to our own situation, but I also want us to assess it as a possible basis for understanding our situation. If the political speeches most heard by Americans are among our most common sources of ideas about what we are doing in foreign affairs, the challenge is to see how they rather than the government plans circulated among bureaucrats explain American foreign policy. Like Orwin, I think that it anachronistic to find ideological motives in the modern sense in the Athenian position. On the wisdom of Diodotus and his connection to Thucydides, see Forde , pp.

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