The Strong Do What They Can and Suffer What They Must | Jonathan Kirshner

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of political science and international studies at Boston College and of political economy at Cornell University. He is also the author of several books, including An Unwritten Future, Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics. He recently authored an essay in Foreign Affairs, in which he compares the nature of American power in the 21st century to that of the Athenian Empire on the eve of the Sicilian expedition in the last decade of the Peloponnesian War. Jonathan and I spent the first half of our conversation today tracing the war's origins alongside his main argument that one of Thucydides' most frequently quoted passages has been used to justify a political worldview that stands in direct opposition to the lesson he intended for us to learn, that great powers are undone less by their rivals than by their own restlessness and hubris, and that prudence rather than gratuitous use of force is the true mark of a durable empire. America's two long wars, the global financial crisis and its latest campaign against Iran are all in their own ways expressions of an imperial power operating without constraint and with little consideration for the national interest. The hollowing out of American domestic institutions and the growth of the unitary executive, the fate of America's alliance networks and international institutions that have underwritten its imperial influence since the Second World War, and the sobering possibility that the forces shaping the trajectory of American empire reside less in any single administration than the society that produced it are all themes we grapple with in the second half of this episode. If you want access to the transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which includes summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to our super nerd tier at hiddenforces.io/subscribe.
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Jonathan Kirshner, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

**Jonathan Kirshner** (2:53)
Always a pleasure to be here.

**Demetri Kofinas** (2:55)
You are one of my favorite recurring guests. Well, I wouldn't have called you a recurring guest actually until today. You were on the podcast some years ago, and then you recently made an appearance in an episode of the 100 Year Pivot that I co-host with Grant Williams.
And you're back. You're back in force after having published an article recently in Foreign Affairs titled The Strong Do What They Can and Suffer What They Must, which is a slightly altered quote pulled from the Melian Dialogue within Richard Crowley's translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which I understand you also teach a course at university. And even that translation though is subject to interpretation, specifically the word strong and suffer carry more subjective weight in Crowley's translation than may have been intended, but you're the expert, so maybe you'll have a chance to tell us. What inspired you to construct a critique of American foreign policy by leaning on the seemingly inconsequential genocide of 30,000 Aegean islanders in classical Greece?

**Jonathan Kirshner** (3:53)
Well, the question is, why did Thucydides dwell on that? Because as you said, in the course of this vast war, it is a rather inconsequential event, and yet he stops the action and invents this dialogue, and so it was obviously very important to Thucydides. So we can talk a lot about why it was important to Thucydides, but I want to get back to your larger question about motivations. I'm really enchanted with Thucydides' work, the Peloponnesian War, although I do read it in English, and I'm dependent upon translations and commentaries, of which I have read many, but I am not a classicist. I'm a student of international relations. But in my discipline of international relations, most people and most students, although there are very important exceptions, are what I call revolving door Thucydidians, which means they come in with a sentence that says, the war was caused by the rise of Athenian power and the fear invoked in Sparta, and then they skip ahead to the Peloponnesian War to the Melian Dialogue in which they say, the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must, 16 years later.