Abstract
The first to dream up a city laid out in three rings through which run canals in the shape of a cross was the great Plato; what a joy for him, what a joy for us! For him, because it shows how clever he was, even though, poor man, he lived in a simple (owing to the spread of political correctness, one is no longer allowed to say ‘primitive’) society 2500 years ago; for us, because, by studying him, we prove to ourselves how wise, how profound and well informed, we are. What does not seem to occur to anybody is that the city’s basic design is, at bottom, a very simple one, and that, being simple, it may well have occurred to many different people working independently at many different times and places.
The hero of this book is not Plato but his close contemporary Thucydides. That apart, the underlying idea is precisely similar: Thucydides’ text, we are told, ‘contains the first detailed presentation of the theory of grand strategy’ (p. 81) which still applies; how clever of him to devise it, and how clever of us (i.e. the two authors, professors at various institutes in Athens) to discover him! Now let’s go on to develop the idea in some detail. Which, in practice, amounts to a long session of mutual backscratching between the dead Thucydides on one hand and his would-be successors on the other.
Unfortunately, much of the backscratching makes little or no sense. Thus we are told that, in the Greek world at the time, ‘the distribution of power was essentially bipolar’ (p. 36). However, the very next sentence says that ‘the relative position of Sparta and Athens vis-a-vis the other Greek states did not remotely resemble that of the United States and the Soviet Union vis-a-vis the rest of the World during the Cold War’ (why not?). Now we are told that Athens was ‘the status quo power’ (p. 40); now that ‘whenever a state’s power rises compared to that of its strategic opponent [as, by Thucydides’ and the authors’ own account, happened to Athens] that state will seek to change the status quo’ (p. 87), in this case by ‘encroaching upon Sparta’s allies’ (p. 62). Now Sparta is waging a Clausewitz-style war with ‘unlimited objectives’ (p. 63), now ‘the terms imposed on Athens were relatively generous’ (p. 81). The list goes on and on, but the reader will have got the idea.
To make things worse, even as they praise their hero the authors patronize him. He was ‘the originator of a long political realist tradition that paid due attention to the economic sources of national power’ (p. 37), as if money has not always been the sinews of war. He was ‘fully cognizant of the relation between war and politics’ (p. 40, ditto). He provides ‘as good an analysis of the dangers of appeasement as any in modern literature’ (p. 42). He ‘grasped what has now become widely accepted, namely that collapse of great powers can be brought about by overextension’ (p. 43). All that, and more; so clever was this ancient Greek author that he was able to anticipate the work of Carl von Clausewitz, Basil Liddell Hart, Richard Ned Lebow, and even – believe it or not – Martin van Creveld!
In truth, Thucydides is neither a writer on strategy nor an ‘expert’ on international relations. He was a towering figure, well aware of his own stature without, however, boasting of it, but his real greatness does not consist of his profound understanding of a few simple ideas endlessly regurgitated by subsequent analysts. Rather it is the enormous canvas of his work, combined with an extraordinary ability to bring out and integrate every aspect of war from the grand strategic to the tactical and from the economic to the psychological. All this, without ever missing the wood for the trees. As he himself says, he is not a theorist but a historian. And thank goodness for that: it enables him to avoid the kind of infinitely verbose, infinitely boring, and frequently all but incomprehensible ‘theoretical’ analysis that is the hallmark of so much of what goes for modern ‘social science’.
To sum up, this book was written by authors who, whatever their other merits, have managed to trivialize both their own disciplines and, which is much worse, the great, great, ancient Greek author whom they profess to admire. Doing so, of course, is their good right; the reader, though, is well advised to ignore their work and stick to that of Thucydides instead.