Earlier this year, White House aide Stephen Miller made a remarkable comment to CNN’s 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,” he said, “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.” It’s certainly an old idea. It closely resembles one of the most infamous speeches in history, from the “Melian Dialogues” – certainly the much revered American “founding fathers” would have been very familiar with it and would have rejected it. It is, in fact, the kind of thing that George III might have said to them.
On January 29, 2026, Prime Minister Carney made a speech at Davos that has been much commented on and referred to, as re-setting the realities of power in the western world. In a general sense, he suggested that the era of veiled obeisance to American hegemony had begun to reach its end and that the reality of an American Empire which had been generally concealed as the Nato Alliance but had been openly declared by the statements of Donald Trump and his oligarchal minions. In making this revelation, the Oxford educated Carney used two reference points to clarify his vision of western political reality. He referred to a famous essay by Vaclav Havel and the above-referenced quote by Thucydides. The reference to Havel is fairly self-explanatory and Carney dwells on it at length, and so needs little further explanation. The quote from Thucydides does and for three reasons. The first is that not a lot of people curl up with Thucydides these days (more’s the pity) and so very few understood the context and therefore the deeper meaning of the quote. I heard a learned panel of CBC pundits discussing the quote and four of the five either had never heard of Thucydides or thought that he was “some kind of Greek philosopher.” The fifth had heard of him and was at least able to identify the quote as the Aphorism of Thucydides – a popular misnomer – but had little else to offer. The quote (or aphorism) is as follows: “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”
The second reason is that the quote was not of something that Thucydides said (and that’swhy the term “aphorism of Thucydides” is misleading). it was the historian’s reproduction of a speech by an Athenian general. And the third reason is that the purpose of the quote was not to attack the American government but to point out a cogent lesson from history and how it illuminates our moment in time. To clarify and understand this we have to go back to our source (ad fontes) and see what Thucydides was trying to say, so that we can see what Carney was trying to say.
First (sigh) the necessary background.
When the Persians under Xerxes began their attempt to add Greece to their empire in 480 BCE, the majority of the independent city-states sent earth and water in a gesture of obeisance and surrender. But many, including Sparta and Athens but also many smaller “poleis” formed an alliance against the enemy. There were three battles fought that are widely remembered today in modern popular culture. The most famous was the battle of Thermopylae (“The Hot Gates”), the second most famous was the naval battle of Salamis where the Persian fleet was routed by the Greek allies led by the navy of Athens. The third – least well known but most decisive – was the battle of Plataea, where the land forces of the Persians were destroyed by the allies, led by Sparta. After that, the Persians were never a threat again on mainland Greece. Following Plataea, Athens and Sparta took different directions. Sparta chose to discontinue any military action outside the Peloponnesus and essentially retired from the war. Athens went in the opposite direction. Asia Minor – what today is the Aegean coast of Turkey – was heavily populated with Ionian Greeks with linguistic and historic ties to Athens and so Athens chose to drive the Persians from that area as well, using its growing naval power and military confidence. It formed an alliance or league with most of the Aegean Islands and many of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor and together they defeated the Persian forces in that area. The League – known initially as the League of Delos (because the treasury of the League was kept on the island of Delos, sacred to Apollo) – was hugely successful until it finally suffered a set back in Egypt. But by that time the dynamics of the League were in place. Each member had one vote. Athens supplied the bulk of the naval power, but each member was assigned a quota (depending on their size) to be filled with manned ships or, if the member chose, the requisite amount of money for pay for the supplying of those ships and crews by Athens.
Because of the overwhelming power of Athens, most of the smaller states or islands, tended to vote as Athens wished and so what looked in theory like a democratic alliance was, in fact, a heavily Athens-dominated alliance – very much like Nato following WW2. Gradually the “league” evolved into an Athenian empire that was maintained even after peace was made with Persia. The empirical reality was absolutely confirmed in 454 BCE when Athens moved the treasury from Delos (the pretext was that Delos was too vulnerable to enemy attack) to Athens; and, in fact, a portion of it was used to fund the building of its new treasury: the Parthenon. Pericles, who had played a large part in the planning of this metamorphosis from league to empire, had some very stern words of warning for the democratic assembly of Athens concerning its (their) new empire.
Firstly, he warned that once an empire was undertaken it had to be retained. People to do not take kindly to losing their sovereignty and, if the opportunity is presented will rebel or secede, or even join with the enemy to seek revenge. Secondly, do not try to add any mainland territory to the empire, Athens' power was naval and it could not safely hold land territories. Thirdly, do no get so confident as to overreach and seek to grow the empire too large – it could easily lead to disaster. And then Pericles died in the great plague of 430 and Athens forgot all his warnings. Meanwhile, Sparta, Corinth and others began to fear the power of Athens and went to war with it. Various parts of the empire began to chafe under Athenian rule and rebel.
Two other facts are important here. As Athens reached military ascendancy at sea it also became the commercial capital of the western Mediterranean. Trade flowed through the tremendous harbour complex that the Athenians built at Piraeus, which was connected by the “long walls” (about 7 Km long) with Athens itself. Athens became quite wealthy from trade alone. The other factor was Athenian cultural dominance. Led by Pericles, Athens sought to display its cultural superiority in many different ways. It built superlative public buildings (like the Parthenon) and temples (like at Sounion). It led the west in decorative arts, especially sculpture, featuring the work of Phidias and his colossal statues of Athena and Zeus. And it drew vast crowds from the entire Mediterranean to spectacular festivals and presentations such as the Athenian invention of theatre and the yearly Panathenaic processions. This was neither accidental nor a natural outgrowth of democratic values or sudden wealth; it was a conscious strategy to overwhelm and influence – and it worked. Athens was the wonder of it’s time. And Sparta felt forced to react with force before it was too late.
Now, within this context we need to look at two short parts of Thucydides’ history. The first is called the MyteleneianDebate and the second the Melian Dialogue.
We are, of course, pretty much restricted to accepting the version of the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides gives us. But over time it has been found that the Greek historians starting with Herodotus (at one timereferred to as “the father of lies”) have turned out to have been much more accurate than previously thought. Thucydides probably did have a class bias against democracy, and also a grudge against Athens for firing and exiling him (unfairly) for a command decision he made that cost a number of lives. But, on the whole, he is still accepted and respected as a reliable historian of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and one of the great political historians of the west. He gave us an extraordinary account of the long war between Athens and Sparta which ended in the defeat of Athens – although Thucydides (for unknown reasons) breaks off a few years before the end. But even if he died then, he would have seen the catastrophe of Athens coming. The last few years of the war were a desperate hanging on for survival.
The Myteleneian Debate took place in 427 BCE two years after the death of Pericles in the great plague of Athens and can be quickly summarized. Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos, decided to take advantage of Athens’ prostration from the plague, seize the rest of the island of Lesbos and revolt from the league/empire. The Athenians sent a fleet and anarmy and defeated them in battle. The generals then sent back to Athens for instructions as to how to proceed. It should be remembered that Lesbos was on the other side of the Aegean Sea, a long three-day row away. The Athenians in democratic assembly debated the decision and decided (convinced by a populist named Creon) that an example must be made and voted to put all the men to death and enslave the women and children. A trireme was dispatched to give the order. But it was a close vote and a lot of people were troubled by the wisdom of the decision. Words like justice and fairness and bad example were bandied about the city. It was decided to call another assembly the next day and re-debate the issue. This time, after the same issues were discussed, the vote went the other way. A second, double-crewed, trireme was sent to Lesbos and arrived just in time to prevent the executions.
Now before we get all warm and fuzzy about this last-minute change of heart and how mercy “won out” in the end, it would serve us well to look at what was actually debated in the assembly. The Athenians were realizing, perhaps for the first time, what it meant to have and hold an empire. The debate was centered on which decision would serve best to deal with future revolts which it now realized were very likely. Creon’s position was that any sign of mercy would be a signal to other members of the “league” that a failed revolt would not have a heavy penalty; so use fear. The opposite position was that, since revolts were likely to happen, indicating lesser penalties would encourage the troublesome members to surrender quickly, knowing that they would receive mercy rather than holding out to the bitter end knowing they would receive none. The debate was over practical politics, not mercy and not justice.
The Carney quote is from a section of The History of the Peloponnesian War called the Melian Dialogue and is set in 416/5 whichis after Athen’s Sicilian disaster (the reach too far moment Pericles had warned them about) and at the point where the empire of the Athenians is already beginning its long decline into defeat – whether the Athenians knew that or not.The island of Melos had never actually been a part of the Athenian empire (it was a former Spartan colony) and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the Athenians arrived at the island with a fleet made up largely of allies and demanded surrender: a bit like our Greenland moment. A debate ensued between the Athenians and the leaders of Melos in which honour, hope, justice and rights were discussed. The Athenians pointed out that hope is an “expensivecommodity,” who knows what side the gods are on, and then, rather than justify their actions they made the following statement: “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” This is referred to in most media – even Wikipedia – as the Aphorism of Thucydides, but that is somewhat misleading. Thucydides does not ever name his sources, and he could not have been there, but he places these speeches in the mouths of the Athenians rather than claiming them for himself. He even goes to far as to switch to dialogue form, its only use in The War, to make that clear. It is, then, actually the Athenian Aphorism on power. The leaders of Melos chose to hope and to fight and they lost. All the men were killed and all the women and children were sold into slavery.
The quote was, I think, chosen by Carney for a couple of reasons. One reason is that Stephen Miller has been saying the same sort of thing on Fox News about America – and I very much doubt that Miller had been reading Thucydides. The second is that the American aggression against Greenland is similar to that of Athens against Melos – unprovoked and unintelligible except as greed. It is simply an expression of “I can, so I will.” The third reason is the uncanny similarity between the empires of Athens and the U.S. America has often been compared to Rome, in multiple monographs,articles and books. But Rome conquered lands and America did not (it just bought them) and since the second world war, it has built its empire on alliances and bases around the world, exactly like the Athenians did around the Aegean. Sea and air power have held it together – like Athenian sea-power. And Athens became the commercial hub of its empire, in ways that Rome never did. And Athens was a democracy, at least until near the end.
But something happened to Athens that had to do with their attitude to power as expressed in the aphorism. And that change in attitude first began to turn the Athenian (or Delian) “league” into the Athenian“empire.” As time passed the Athenians became more callous and brutal towards their former allies, now their subjects. Then the allies began to rebel, to resist. The Athenians turned to reprisals of extreme violence. This and several other factors (like the Persian infusion of money into the war) began the decline and fall of Athens and its empire, and the war was lost.
Either Carney was just quoting a convenient and available quote (remember, he wrote the speech himself) or, he had a deeper message for the readers of Thucydides. I don’t know; but he is a clever man with a comprehensive education – they have a great fondness for the classics at Oxford University. In either case it is not unfair to see the quote as drawing a clear parallel between the Athenian and the American empires – in development, change and decline. Like Athens, America is no longer there as a reliable and trustworthy defender, a loyal big brother. Now America is pivoting to the arrogance of power; seizing what it wants and can take – and boasting about it.This is the moment when the members of the “league” begin to realize that they may need each other more than they need the boss. In fact, the boss is becoming the problem.
