Might does not always make right, or even sense

The “Melian Dialogue,” from Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War, is the foundational text of the Realist school of international relations theory.

It’s 416 B.C., and the island-statelet of Melos has remained neutral in the war between the local superpowers, Athens and Sparta. A diplomatic delegation from Athens goes to Melos and demands that the Melians join Team Athens. The Melians decline, first citing principles of justice. The Athenians, unmoved, finally resort to force and, to make a long story short, Melos is defeated, its surviving men killed, its women and children sold into slavery, and its territory colonized by Athens. The Athenians thus give brutal effect to the money quote from the Dialogue, in which the Athenian negotiators tell the Melian leaders “…you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

All of which brings us to Stephen Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, and his appearance on CNN in early January. There, Mr. Miller had this to say to Jake Tapper:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

Thucydides, call your office.

Miller’s rant was not only morally repulsive; it was historically ignorant and strategically idiotic.

As to morally repulsive, blustering about might-makes-right-and-always-has-so-get-over-it rings up “schoolyard bully” (or, if you prefer, “totalitarian thug”) rather than “democratic statesman.” In that brilliant film, The King’s Speech, King George VI, heroically overcoming his lifelong stutter, defends Britain’s September 3, 1939, declaration of war against Nazi Germany on the grounds that supine acquiescence to the German invasion of Poland would mean accepting the Athenians’ brutal definition of international relations in the Melian Dialogue:

For we are called, with our allies, to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world.

It is the principle which permits a state, in the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges; which sanctions the use of force, or threat of force, against the sovereignty and independence of other states.

Such a principle, stripped of all disguise, is surely the mere primitive doctrine that “might is right.”

As to historical ignorance, Mr. Miller might acquaint himself with the history of the decade in which he was born, the 1980s: the decade that saw off the Soviet empire in central and eastern Europe. For while NATO hard power helped set the context for that victory of imperfect democracies over pluperfect tyrannies, it was the soft power revolution that swept through the region from the late 1970s on — a revolution of conscience shaped by a man whose only army was the Swiss Guard, Pope John Paul II — that made possible the peaceful transition beyond communism that had seemed impossible since 1945.

As to strategic idiocy: I do not agree with those who claim that Mr. Miller’s chest-thumping effectively gave Vladimir Putin carte blanche to conquer Ukraine (and Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states, and chunks of Poland and Norway), while giving the green light to Xi Jinping to ingest Taiwan. Those totalitarians operate by their own amoral calculus, not by putative permission slips dispensed by American bureaucrats. What Miller did do, however, was gravely undercut the strategic rationale that would support any effort by the democracies to resist such Russian and Chinese imperialism. And, to return to my first point, he peremptorily ceded any moral high ground the civilized nations of the world might be able to claim in the face of uncivilized aggression by Russia and China. 

American foreign policy has always sought to advance the national interest, which means it has always had a realist component. But the “national interest” is not a concept somehow outside the realm of moral reason. Defining the national interest includes taking an inventory of the nation’s moral principles and then putting them to work prudently. Since World War II, those principles have made the United States the trusted (if often exasperating) superpower, at least in the minds of the civilized nations of the world. To fritter that trust away — to detonate it by silly, incendiary sound-bites on CNN — is mind-boggling folly.

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