Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman
After U.S. special forces seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, President Trump announced the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and help itself to lots of oil. Trump warned Maduro’s successor she would pay “a very big price” if she did not comply. Trump’s ultimatum will sound familiar to anyone who has read Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian War” and his fictionalized account of negotiations between Athens, the world’s dominant naval power, and Melos, a neutral island state.
Locked in a war with Sparta, Athens ordered Melos to pay tribute or be destroyed. Dismissing appeals to justice and morality, Athens insisted that right “is only in question between equals in power” and “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” For hundreds of years, governments viewed war as a legitimate way to pursue vital national interests, with each state the only judge of what they might be. It took two world wars and the advent of nuclear weapons for the U.S. and its allies to take seriously a radical idea: war must no longer be a lawful instrument of national policy. The linchpin of this new order was the UN Charter’s prohibition of any use of force not undertaken in self-defense or authorized by the Security Council.
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