Peter Doran

🇺🇦🇪🇺⚔️Why does Sławomir Dębski’s description of diplomacy as a hall of mirrors, with everybody dutifully dancing to an orchestra playing out of tune, remind so much of Thucydides? It captures a recurring failure of statecraft that the ancient Greeks understood rather better than many of today’s European leaders appear to do. 📚It is a pattern that classicist Victor Davis Hanson repeatedly examines in his histories of Greek and modern warfare: the fatal confusion of an operational pause with a strategic settlement, of temporary relief with lasting security, and of diplomatic ceremony with political achievement. 📜Thucydides returns repeatedly to the contest between power, fear, honour, and interest. The political settlement must address the causes and incentives that sustain a war. Otherwise the cessation of hostilities is liable to become no more than an intermission, during which the protagonists replenish their forces, reconsider their ambitions, and prepare for the next act. 🕊️The Peace of Nicias in 421 BC is the outstanding example. Athens and Sparta, exhausted after ten years of fighting, concluded a treaty intended to last fifty years. Both sides had suffered grievously; neither had secured a decisive victory; the prospect of relief was understandably attractive. Yet the original disputes remained. Athenian imperial ambitions, Spartan fears of Athenian power, conflicting obligations towards their respective allies, and the political costs of concession had not disappeared. Important provisions of the treaty went unfulfilled, several allies rejected its terms, and hostilities continued through intermediaries and competing alliances. ⚔️In 418 BC came Mantinea, where Sparta defeated an Argive-led coalition supported by Athens. In 416 BC Athens attacked neutral Melos and the following year embarked upon its disastrous Sicilian Expedition. By 413 BC, within a few years, the wider war had resumed in earnest, with Sparta establishing a permanent military position at Decelea in Attica. Thucydides himself, in Book V.26, explicitly rejects the proposition that the intervening years constituted genuine peace. Neither party had fulfilled its obligations, and military conflict had continued. He therefore treats the entire twenty-seven years, from 431 to 404 BC, as one war. 🇷🇺⚔️🇬🇪🇺🇦 By comparison, the present Russian war against free European societies began in Georgia in 2008, continued with the assault on Ukraine in 2014, and intensified with the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Europe has therefore been facing the same contest with the Russian dictatorship for nigh on eighteen years. Neither the smouldering ceasefires that followed the Georgian war nor the various Minsk agreements on Ukraine eradicated the underlying causes or produced a lasting settlement. ⚡️The distinction could hardly be clearer. A treaty may suspend certain operations without settling the conflict that gave rise to them. The appearance of peace does not establish its existence. The war eventually ended with Athens defeated, its fleet destroyed or surrendered, its Long Walls demolished, and its empire dismantled. The settlement of 421 BC had resolved none of the underlying contest over power and security. .... More on this and how Europe can & must address it you can find on our iWi Substack. Link below. @SlawomirDebski @SchullerKonrad @PeterBDoran @John_ForemanCBE @DrChrisParry @ChuckPfarrer