Atticism and the Summit for Democracy
When in the course of reading the two most authoritative accounts that together chronicle the war of the Spartans and the Athenians and how they waged it against each other—i.e., the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides and the Hellenica by Xenophon—we come across the word attikizo and its cognates on at least seven different occasions: five in the former work and twice in the latter, by our count (see Thuc. III.62.2, III.64.5, IV.133.1,
VIII.38.3, and VIII.87.1; Xen. Hell. I.6.13 and VI.3.14). A straightforward definition of this Thucydidean neologism is “to become like or join or side with the Athenians; to work for the interests of Athens.” However, as Victor Davis Hansonpoints out in A War Like No Other (2005), attikizo also has a normative connotation: it a “special word of sorts for Athenian expansionism.” We can thus allow ourselves to take the noun ‘Atticism’ to mean, figuratively, “alignment to a stronger power by a subordinate one acting under constraint at a time of crisis.” We may note, besides, that the classical Greek understanding of crisis connotes not just a meaning of momentous decisionand thus uncertain outcome, resulting in the need to exercise prudential judgment; it is also a key Hippocratic term used to refer to a sudden change in the health of a body towards either recovery or a turn for the worst. Crisis thus understood does not perforce imply predetermined reason or directionality.
It is with this in mind that we can begin with preparations to conduct a little thought experiment on the strategic implications of the Summit for Democracy, which the Biden
Administration staged online in December 2021 with much fanfare. In so doing, we can do worse than to call to mind a slight modification of something Barack Obama once
said to Mitt Romney: “the 2000s called, and they want their foreign policy back” because, in many ways, the Summit for Democracy is reminiscent of various proposals put forward by Washington insiders in the first years of the third millennium for the establishment of some sort of U.S.‑led global coalition of democratic states. As we shall see, the speeches and deeds of the Biden Administration have provided enough evidence to suggest it may embrace some of the more dangerous elements of said proposals in the time ahead. This, in turn, may leave it open to the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism in the pursuit of its “America is Back” foreign policy posture. To get a sense of the possible effects thereof on U.S. national interests hereafter, we shall proceed with an inquiry into the scale, scope, and prudence of what we understand to be the Biden Administration’s essential ambition. We shall at times proceed in a contemporaneously unconventional approach on the grounds that operating in this manner can shed light on such matters in ways that conventional ones cannot, or at least cannot do as well. Genealogy of Morals Before coming to the various proposals made in the 2000s for the establishment of some sort of U.S.‑led global coalition of democratic states—an examination of which should prepare us to conduct our little thought experiment per se—we observe that “America is Back” represents most obviously a political aspiration to repudiate the foreign policy posture of the antecedent administration, which had conducted its external affairs according to the “America First” slogan that may be said to have been encapsulated by words spoken by Donald Trump in September 2019 during an address to the UN General Assembly: “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors, and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.” But we suggest that “America is Back” may also be understood to be a reference to the spirit of an earlier moment in world politics in which it could be said that America had in fact recuperated or perpetuated its standing and come back (or out) on top.
In the speeches and deeds that revolve around the holding of the Summit for Democracy, the Biden Administration has provided enough evidence to suggest it may have left itself open to the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism.
Testing the soundness of this suggestion requires a look back to the text that intellectually triggered the onset of that earlier time: namely, Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History?” article, published in the Summer 1989 edition of The National Interest. Fukuyama rightfully acknowledged that much of the core of the argument contained in his paper was based on an influential set of lectures delivered in Paris between 1933 and 1939 by Alexandre Kojève. Of some relevance may be that, after World War II, Kojève became u n q u e st i o n a b l y one of the central behind‑the‑scenes figures in the first stages of what its proponents call the “construction of Europe” (on the authority of a remark once made to me by Stanley Rosen, who regularly met with him in the early 1960s, Kojève was fond of saying that his senior position in the French Directorate of External Economic Relations enabled him to preside over the end of history); he was also almost certainly a spy for the Soviet Union from 1940 until his death in 1968. Be that as it may, let us return to the subject of his lectures, published as a book in 1947 based on the notes of one of its attendees. A key passage, for present purposes, is the one in which Kojève, quasi‑building on Hegel, makes the case for a “universal and homogeneous State: it unites all of humanity (at least that part which counts historically) and ‘subsumes’ (aufhebt) within its bosom all the ‘specific differences’ (Besonderheit): nations, social classes, families. [...] Therefore: wars and revolutions are henceforth impossible.” Understood thusly, the universal and homogeneous states is a uniform and consolidated global economic and social order operating within a common, politically institutionalized space. In Kojève’s words: “which is to say that this state will no longer modify itself, will remain eternally identical to itself. Yet Man is formed by the state in which he lives and acts. Therefore Man also will not change anymore.” Quasi‑building on Kojève yet stopping short of accepting the full consequences of his argument, Fukuyama in his article heralded the imminent coming of the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” with only liberal democracy left standing. In the world at the end of history, Fukuyama hypothesized there will be “no need for generals or statesmen; what remains is primarily economic activity, [...] the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, [...] the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands [and] the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”
Left unaddressed by Fukuyama is the question, amongst others, of who would curate the exhibit, as it were. This task was swiftly taken up by others. Influential Washington insiders like Charles Krauthammer, for example, wanted the United States to press home its advantage in order to solidify America’s primacy. Hence the concept of “unipolarity,” which he first laid out in late 1990 in a special edition of Foreign Affairs. “The true geopolitical structure of the post‑Cold War world,” Krauthammer said, is a “single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West.” A series of writings by Robert Cooper, a prominent Tony Blair‑era British diplomat and later EU bureaucrat, articulated most clearly what may be characterized as the European codicil both to Fukuyama’s end of history hypothesis and Krauthammer’s championing of a unipolar moment or era (in late 2002, the latter decided that the term ‘moment’ “seems rather modest;” in the pages of The National Interest he thus declared that the “unipolar moment has become the unipolar era”). Thus, for example, in his The Postmodern State and World Order (2000), Cooper opined that “what happened in 1989 went beyond the events of 1789, 1815, or 1919.” In his contribution to an edited volume that appeared two years later, he stated that “in [our] postmodern world, raison d’état and the amorality of Machiavelli’s theories of statecraft, which defined international relations in the modern era, have been replaced.” In the latter article, he referred to his new age as one in which “postmodern imperialism” or “cooperative empire” would be practiced without impunity or pushback by some sort of transatlantic coalition of liberal democracies. Writing in The National Interest in March 2005, Cooper’s preferred term became “imperial liberalism.”
While those caught up in the spirit of that earlier moment in world politics differed on accents and minutiae, they can be said to have held in common the vainglorious claim that, in effect, humankind was done in principle with geopolitics, which was no longer understood as being a permanent condition of humanity but rather an overcomeable phase of world history that was on the very cusp of actualization. A hegemonic peace would reign over an ever‑increasingly large swath of the earth, with ‘rogue states’ put down in quick succession in military demonstrations so awesome that effectually all other states would choose to fall in line: the strong expectation shared by those caught up in the spirit of that earlier moment in world politics was that raison de planète or raison de démocratie or some Atticized combination thereof would henceforth hold sway, evermore unopposed. On this subject—which at times could be excused for being thought of as falling under an imaginary academic rubric called Critical Studies in Secular Eschatology—much has already been written; there is no compellingly useful reason to pursue the matter in greater detail, given present purposes.
On the other hand, we observe that the strategic implications of the Biden Administration’s foreign policy posture—exemplified by those of its speeches and deeds that revolve around the holding of the Summit for Democracy—have not yet been fully subjected to the sort of scrutiny that has been heretofore the norm in the United States and in those circles outside that country’s borders that concern themselves with trying to understand America’s foreign policy postures (or, for that matter, international relations tout court). A contribution to this sort of undertaking is therefore both necessary and proper. In a moment, we shall proceed to do so, as we have announced, in the form of a little thought experiment, having first concluded our preparations through a brief examination of a representative sample of the ‘global coalition of democracies’ proposals that were made in the 2000s—that is to say, in the wake of the publication of almost all of the texts examined in the preceding three paragraphs.
Writing in the Washington Post in May 2004, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay effectually kicked it all off by calling for an “alliance of democracies” that, “like NATO during the Cold War, […] should become the focal point of American foreign policy. Unlike NATO, however, the alliance would not be formed to counter any country or be confined to a single region.” However, this statement should be read next to what they proposed a little earlier in their piece: “respect for state sovereignty should be conditional on how states behave at home, not just abroad.”
In a lengthy article published in the Fordham International Law Journal in February 2005, John Davenport advocated in favor of a “federation of democratic nations.” His main proposal involved setting up a “new framework in which every major democratic State pledges ground troops and resources […] to a permanent alliance that […] would oppose tyranny, theocracy, and terrorism everywhere, and uphold fundamental human rights by force when necessary.”
In September 2006, Anne Bayefsky argued in the Jerusalem Post for the establishment of an “international organization of democracies, by democracies, and for democracies” to be called the “United Democratic Nations.” This proposal was explicitly put forward in support of a call by then U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to establish a “council of democracies outside of the UN system [that would] truly monitor, examine, and expose human rights abuses around the globe.” The next year, she published an edited volume called The UN and Beyond that expanded her core argument with the help of various contributors.
Also in September 2006, G. John Ikenberry and Anne‑Marie Slaughter championed the establishment of a “concert of democracies” in a report commissioned by the Princeton Project on National Security entitled Forging a World Under Liberty and Law. The “new institution” they advocated was designed to “strengthen security cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies,” “institutionalize and ratify the ‘democratic peace’,” and serve as an “alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective action, including the use of force, by a supermajority vote. Its membership would be selective, but self‑selected.” The report even concluded with a one‑page draft “Charter for a Concert of Democracies.”
At the beginning of 2007, Daalder and Lindsay developed their original idea more fully in The American Interest whilst adopting the term—“concert of democracies”—favored by Ikenberry and Slaughter. They called for bringing the “established democracies together into a single institution [in order to] be best able to meet the many challenges that beset the new age of global politics.” This institution would operate based on a “framework of binding mutual obligations” and focus on three things: first, “helping democracies confront their mutual security challenges;” second, “promote economic growth and development;” and third “promote democracy and human rights.” The authors took pains to stress that they were “not proposing a photo‑op bedecked gab fest” but rather a fully‑fledged institution with its own secretariat, budget, regular ministerials and summits, and so on.
We can add that Daalder teamed up with Robert Kagan in August 2007 to coauthor an op‑ed in the Washington Post called “The Next Intervention” that reaffirmed the idea of a “concert of democracies” and stated that the “policy of seeking consensus among the world’s great democratic nations can form the basis for a new domestic consensus on the use of force.’’
I t was within such a charged intellectual atmosphere that John McCain delivered a keynote address before the Hoover Institution in May 2007 calling for a “league of democracies” (this particular phrase was launched by Tod Lindberg in February 2007 in a The Weekly Standard article titled “The Treaty of Democratic Peace: What the World Needs Now;” subsequently, it was adopted by Kagan in a May 2008 Financial Times op‑ed and rekindled in 2018 by Davenport in his book‑length treatment of the subject). McCain’s speech envisioned that this “league” would “form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom.” He imagined it being “the one organization where the world’s democracies could come together to discuss problems and solutions on the basis of shared principles and a common vision of the future.” He also characterized his proposal as not being a form of idealism but “the truest kind of realism” because, as he put it, “today as in the past, our interests are inextricably linked to the global progress of our ideals.”
Of some relevance may be that at the moment he delivered his Hoover address, McCain was both a sitting U.S. senator and a candidate for the American presidency. Here is another quote from that speech: “if I am elected president, I will call a summit of the world’s democracies in my first year to seek the views of my democratic counterparts and begin exploring the practical steps necessary to realize this vision.” He repeated this pledge (as well as his call for the establishment of a “league of democracies”) almost verbatim in a November 2007 Foreign Affairs article. As it happens, so did Joe Biden—during his successful candidacy for the American presidency. In January 2020, also in the pages of Foreign Affairs, he made the following pledge: “during my first year in office, the United States will organize and host a global Summit for Democracy to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world. It will bring together the world’s democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda.” We can add that Biden served alongside McCain in the U.S. Senate for decades before going on to be Barack Obama’s vice president and then, still later, being elected to the presidency itself. Lastly, we can mention that Biden and McCain developed a “great friendship,” as can readily be seen from even a cursory examination of the text of the funeral oration he delivered at McCain’s memorial service in August 2018.
As a postscript of sorts to our preparations for conducting a little thought experiment on the strategic implications of the Summit for Democracy, we observe that none of the aforementioned ‘global coalition of democracies’ proposals from the 2000s made much of the existence and influence of what can be said to be the world’s largest organization of democratic states: the European Union. (The same cannot be said of Fukuyama, however; for example, in an April 2007 The Guardian op‑ed, he stated his belief that the “European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post‑historical world.’”) Almost all the authors of those proposals in one way or another adopted the view that the EU’s members may each be included in the alliance, federation, concert, league, or what have you, but only as distinct sovereign states and not, as its proponents might put it, as indivisible parts of a distinct economic and social order operating within a common, politically institutionalized space—i.e., as a unified community of nations. Perhaps the authors of the aforementioned proposals were unimpressed by what came later to be called the “Brussels effect”—the term was conceived by Anu Bradford only in 2012—could become an effective handmaiden in the quest to what, as we shall see, the Biden Administration has termed the ‘renewal of democracy.’ Or perhaps they were unimpressed because the EU lacked a military (it still lacks one today); or because the EU’s institutions could not independently formulate their own foreign policy (still today, the formulation of the EU’s “common foreign and security policy” remains predominantly an intergovernmental process and its High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy cannot in any serious way be understood as being an actor in international politics of the same standing and caliber as, say, the foreign ministers of Germany or France, much less the UK Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs or, for that matter, the equivalent cabinet position in some other sovereign states).
Further to our postscript, we observe that the aforementioned proposals make even shorter shrift of something that has existed since June 2000: the Community of Democracies. Lack of space and other constraints prevent us from saying too much about this entity—a contrivance of Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. We can, however, note briefly that it self‑identifies as an “intergovernmental coalition of states which seeks to coordinate action on human rights and democracy at regional and international levels” in furtherance of a vision in which “every nation respects and upholds the core democratic values, principles, and standards” of its founding Warsaw Declaration; that it has a permanent secretariat headed by its own secretary general; and that a “democracy caucus” may still convene at the UN under its auspices.
Throwing Down the Gauntlet
Our preliminary overview having been completed, we now find ourselves sufficiently prepared to engage directly in a little thought experiment on the strategic implications of the Biden Administration’s official rhetoric on the subject of the Summit for Democracy.
We begin by quoting the first sentence displayed on the Summit’s official website: “since day one, the Biden‑Harris Administration has made clear that renewing democracy in the United States and around the world is essential to meeting the unprecedented challenges of our time.” (I have chosen to italicize ‘essential’ from this point on in the essay to draw the reader’s attention to this word choice by the Biden Administration, which presumably was a purposeful one: in everyday contemporary English, it means something completely necessary or indispensable; the root of the word is Latin and is used to translate ousia, a Greek word that is pregnant with meaning in Western philosophical and Christian theological contexts).
This is the first sentence found on the Summit for Democracy’s website: “since day one, the Biden‑Harris Administration has made clear that renewing democracy in the United States and around the world is essential to meeting the unprecedented challenges of our time.
Let us next put this quite bold statement alongside the fact that the Biden Administration has made it clear in both speech and deed that at least some of these “unprecedented challenges” have to do with threats to the promotion and, in turn, universal acceptance, of what its proponents call the ‘rules‑based liberal international order.’ Now, two of the main threats to this U.S.‑led orderin‑the‑making—Biden indicated as much in his first major foreign policy speech as U.S. president, delivered in February 2021 at the State Department—are Russia and China: great powers that are perceived to be the chief opponents of “renewing democracy in the United States and around the world.” In the last quarter of 2021, the Biden A d m i n i s t r a t i o n identified two new concrete threats emanating from Moscow and Beijing, respectively: the possibility of a Russian military offensive into Ukraine and the possibility of a Chinese military offensive into Taiwan. Here we can underline that Ukraine and Taiwan were both invited to the Summit and thus are presumably understood to be democracies, according to whatever criteria were used; Russia and China were not and thus are presumably understood not to be, according to the same undisclosed criteria.
On the basis of a straightforward reading of the aforementioned statement (i.e., the one displayed on the Summit’s official website), we can properly infer that countering these concrete threats and the states from which they originate would be “essential,” for a failure to do so would impede both the worldwide ‘renewal of democracy’ and the ability of democratic states—selected and presumably led by America—to meet the “unprecedented challenges of our time.” We can thus allow ourselves to take it to mean, more generally, that the Biden Administration sees it as being “essential” to defend the ‘rules‑based liberal international order’ against the opponents of the ‘renewal of democracy’—i.e., the “autocrats” to which the U.S. president referred in his opening address to the Summit who, as he put it, “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.
The third step in our little thought experiment is slightly more speculative, but hardly blasphemous or heretical, namely that the view in Washington seems to be that neither Moscow nor Beijing would pose a challenge to the ‘rules‑based liberal international order’ if each regime was to transformed into a democracy in the way that the Biden Administration understands the term. In other words, it may believe that the undemocratic nature of the Russian and Chinese regimes (and others it perceives to be autocratic) stands in the way of the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” in Fukuyama’s famous formulation.
And if this is in fact the belief, then it would mean that, at the end of the day, the Biden Administration considers the Russian and Chinese regimes (and others it perceives to be autocratic) to be illegitimate and not just, say, merely anachronistic (as Fukuyama believed to be the case with China). Furthermore, this would mean that “meeting the unprecedented challenges of our time” requires the transformation of the illegitimate nature of the Russian and Chinese forms of government (and others it perceives to be autocratic) into one that is legitimate. And since the Biden Administration seems to believe that the sole legitimate form of government is democracy (perhaps inspired by Fukuyama’s hypothesis that democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”), then the solution involves—in one way or another—regime change.
From this line of not unreasonable speculation, we could properly infer that championing regime change in Moscow and Beijing (and perhaps in other places) is “essential to meeting the unprecedented challenges of our time.” Of course, doing so would be impractical, to say the least; and we do not mean to imply that the Biden Administration is pursuing an actionable policy of regime change towards Russia and China (and other states it perceives to be autocratic). But this fourth step in our little thought experiment does suggest a development in American foreign policymaking that may be compatible with the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism.
Let us therefore continue by attempting to bring all this a little more to the surface.
Autocratic Illegitimacy
We can proceed by noticing that the United States has no full‑on, binding defensive military alliance with either Ukraine or Taiwan (neither does any other major power, for that matter). This fact, in principle, does not seem to make enough of a difference to the Biden Administration’s semi‑implicit imperative to weaken, isolate, contain, and even anathemize Russia and China (and other states it perceives to be autocratic) at every opportunity in the service of ‘renewing democracy.’ Moreover, the logic of the argument at the core of our little thought experiment would suggest that it also makes no difference that Russia and China have signaled clearly that they have vital interests at stake in Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively, because this signaling amounts to a sphere‑of‑influence argument (in mid‑December 2021, Russia publicly tabled the texts of two draft security treaties—one with the United States and another with NATO— that can be together characterized as constituting more than a request and less than an ultimatum, which makes this argument even more explicit; as of this writing, however, China has not done anything similar). And the Biden Administration also sees this as being altogether illegitimate (Biden himself stated back in February 2009 at the Munich Security Conference, i.e., during his vice presidency, that “we will not recognize any nation as having a sphere of influence”). It thus gives no quarter to the substantial asymmetry in importance that the United States and Russia each ascribe to Ukraine and the United States and China each ascribe to Taiwan. In other words, the Biden Administration gives no quarter to the traditional geopolitical argument that “great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory,” as John Mearsheimer put the matter in Foreign Affairs in September 2014—or at least it gives no quarter to this traditional geopolitical argument as it applies to Russia and China (and at least to some other states it perceives to be autocratic). Hence the failure, as of this writing, of the Biden Administration to reach some sort of accommodation or understanding with the Russian Federation on the basis of the Kremlin’s aforementioned proposals as well as the White House’s unwillingness to produce any concrete proposal of its own.
Substantial corroborating evidence in support of all this can be found in U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s various statements on Russia and China. On Russia, we can refer, for example, to a December 2021 television interview on Meet the Press in which he said that “Ukraine is important, and we are resolute in our commitment to its sovereignty, its territorial integrity. But there is something even bigger at stake here, and it’s the basic rules of the road of the international system, rules that say that one country can’t change the borders of another by force; one country can’t dictate to another country its choices, its decisions in its foreign policy, with whom it will associate; one country can’t exert a sphere of influence over others. That what—that’s what Russia is purporting to assert; and if we let that go with impunity, then the entire system that provides for stability, prevents war from breaking out, is endangered.” On China, we can refer, for example, to the very public spat between the four most senior American and Chinese foreign policy officials that took place in in Anchorage, Alaska in March 2021, in which Blinken, acting as host, stated that “the alternative to a rules‑based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.” Or to Blinken’s even more explicit statement, pronounced in a June 2021 interview to the New York Times, in which he claimed that the only two alternatives to a U.S.‑led “free and open international order” were a world of no order that “inevitably leads to chaos” and a China‑led order that would be “profoundly illiberal in nature.”
Two parenthetic remarks are in order here. First, with regards to the possible objection that Blinken is not Biden, we observe that the U.S. president has stated publicly and with no qualification that “our competitors around the world […] know […] you [i.e., Blinken] speak for me.” Second, it should almost go without saying that such and similar statements by Blinken constitute evidence of either ignorance or mendacity with regards not only to America’s past foreign policy postures but also, more importantly, to the correlation in history between extended periods of stability and a common commitment to the legitimacy of a balance of power system of international order in which states pursue their respective interests within commonly understood bounds and limits. That being said, pronouncing full judgment on Blinken’s unawareness or cynicism is not what our little thought experiment is intended to accomplish and therefore will not be undertaken. Our focus is rather on the prudence of such and similar statements; of ascertaining whether these leave the Biden Administration open to the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism; and of at least pointing to whether such a charge, if valid, would have a deleterious effect on U.S. national interests.
On such a basis we could properly deduce that the Biden Administration sees Russia and China (and other states it perceives to be autocratic) as doubly illegitimate: illegitimate in their very nature and illegitimate in both the conception and execution of the foreign policies that defend their respective vital interests. This can be said to be the bottom‑line assessment.
Now, if our little thought experiment is fallacious or mistaken—then fine: no harm, no foul. But if there is at least some probative value to it, then we could be warranted in suggesting that the foreign policy posture embraced by the Biden Administration—understood as the renewal of democracy around the globe as being “essential” to a defense of the ‘rules‑based liberal international order’—is incredibly ambitious. More so, in fact, that the one expressed by George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural: “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Furthermore, we could plausibly suggest that the Biden Administration’s posture is in alignment with the one embraced by Woodrow Wilson, exemplified in his April 1917 address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in which he requested a declaration of war against Germany. The key passage then was that “a steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. […] Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. […] The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Connecting the conceptual dots backwards from Biden to Bush and Wilson is not without political and scholarly controversy. Still, the linkages are quite far from being obscure—especially if we add to the mix the aforementioned proposals made by McCain and other Washington insiders back in the 2000s and to the writings that intellectually triggered the onset of the spirit of an earlier moment in world politics in which it could be said that America had in fact recuperated or perpetuated its standing and come back (or out) on top—at least one of which explicitly traced much of its core argument back to Kojève’s famous lectures—the ones that introduced the idea of a political project whose goal was the actualization of the universal and homogeneous state. Furthermore, we observe that the postures of both Bush and Wilson were understood at the time of their exposition, at least in some circles, to be revisionist—revolutionary, even. Moreover, these same links do not appear to be evolutionarily antithetical either to a line of thinking that produced the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (and its 1904 Roosevelt Corollary), which is a sphere of influence argument in all but name; or even to one exemplified by Thomas Jefferson’s repeated use of the phrase “empire of liberty” as early as nearly three years prior to the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783) and then subsequently in correspondence with the likes of George Washington and James Madison.
Universal Sphere of Influence
Let us therefore make a bold statement of our own: taken to its logical conclusion, the Biden Administration’s foreign policy posture could have at least two farreaching implications: first, America’s sphere of influence is universal because the objective that underlies it (i.e., the ‘renewal of democracy’) is universal; second, striving towards the objective embodied in that and only that sphere of influence is legitimate.
This, in turn, leads us to ask what may be a fundamental practical question: does the Biden Administration in its heart of hearts believe that the world should live at the end of history and perhaps even strive towards the actualization of the universal and homogeneous state? Or, to put the question less radically does it believe—to paraphrase Fukuyama—that there is no fundamental contradiction in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism?
The logic of our little thought experiment implies that the answer is ‘yes’—at least to the second version of the question. And if this is so, then the only concessions and accommodations America can make to Russia and China (and other states it perceives to be autocratic) can only be of a purely tactical nature: temporary lulls in a zero‑sum, winner‑take‑all contest in which every single country across the globe will be pressured to pick a side. We all remember what George W. Bush said in the immediate wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” At the time, for virtually every country, this was a relatively easy, straightforward choice—at least in principle. After all, what but a few states would have chosen to get in the way of an American reckoning? What but a few states would have desired to be wrathfully inscribed on an American list of perdition? At present, however, things are a little bit more nuanced. And yet, we may presently be entering into a stage in world politics in which the Biden Administration will ask virtually every state to make a similar sort of decision, with the forces of democracy being understood to be in “essential” opposition to the forces of autocracy.
It hardly seems unreasonable to suppose that those invited by the Biden Administration to the Summit for Democracy will be asked in short order to choose to align in some prescribed fashion with some sort of U.S.‑led coalition of democracies—if they have not been already. Quite many are unlikely to appreciate being put in the position of having to make this choice, for a plethora of perfectly sound, traditional reasons involving fear, honor, geopolitical or geo‑economic interest, a combination thereof, or whatever else have you; most will try to avoid doing so, at least explicitly, likely with varying degrees of success. It is of course too soon to tell with any degree of certainty, but we would be unsurprised should the responses (at least those not subjected to the rhetorical conventions of public messaging) fail to meet the Biden Administration’s expectations—in terms of both their levels of fervor and unambiguity.
It hardly seems unreasonable to suppose that those invited by the Biden Administration to the Summit for Democracy will be asked in short order to choose to align in some prescribed fashion with some sort of U.S.‑led coalition of democracies— if they have not been already.
As a decidedly speculative parenthetic we may observe that, in some cases, this reticence may have something to do with how uncomfortably reminiscent this sort of choice is to the rationale that underpinned the Brezhnev Doctrine. We are fully cognizant that such a comparison may fall within the confines of blasphemy or heresy. Still, here is how the doctrine was originally set forth in the pages of Pravda in September 1968: the “weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, and they cannot look indifferently upon this.” Here is another quote from the same source: the “sovereignty of individual socialist countries cannot be set against the interests of world socialism and the world revolutionary movement.” And a third: “even if a socialist country tries to adopt a position ‘outside the blocs’, it in fact retains its national independence only because of the power of the socialist commonwealth—and above all its chief force, the Soviet Union—and the strength of its armed forces.”
We may be on somewhat more solid yet still speculative ground in observing that in other cases, the aforementioned reticence may have something to do with the uncomfortable linkage of the choice to align in some prescribed fashion with some sort of U.S.‑led coalition of democracies to the work begun by Michael Walzer on designing a theory that would extend the argument about jus ad bellum to include jus ad vim. This last should be understood within the double context of our considerations of the ‘rulesbased liberal international order’ and the logic of the argument that led us to refer to the championing— in principle, if not in practice—of a policy of regime change that we had earlier indicated may be compatible with the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism. To that end, we quote at some length from the preface to the fourth revised edition (2006) of Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977): “The immediate question for us is whether the permissions [for force‑short‑of‑war] reach to regime change and democratization. […] [T]his is closely connected to questions about prevention.
Preventive war is not justifiable either in standard just war theory or in international law, but what we might think of as ‘preventive force’ can be justified when we are dealing with a brutal regime that has acted aggressively or murderously in the past and gives us reason to think that it might do so again. In such cases, we aim at containment but hope for regime change. And we can legitimately design the containment policy to advance this further purpose whenever that is possible— which means that we can use force, in limited ways, for the sake of producing a new (and if new then also democratic) regime.” Walzer then concludes his prefatory by suggesting “one further step in the regime change argument,” namely “what we may call ‘politics‑short‑offorce,’ non‑coercive politics, the work of non‑governmental organizations, like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty I n t e r n a t i o n a l , which also aim, in their own way, at regime change.” He makes the connection explicit in his final sentences: “politics‑short‑offorce may depend on force‑shortof‑war. In fact, we have to sponsor and support this interaction—because these two together can help us avoid war itself.” Such a strategy of “indirection,” he speculates, may enable its proponents to “reach justice without the terrible destructiveness of war.
Be that as it may, the contemporary situation is rendered even less clear‑cut because both Russia and China have studiously avoided formulating their remonstration towards America’s advocacy for a ‘rules‑based liberal international order’ in binary or at least dichotomous terms. “Our position,” one can almost hear their respective leaders and plenipotentiaries saying, “is that you don’t have to make this decision: we require no profession of allegiance.
The contemporary situation is rendered even less clear‑cut because both Russia and China have studiously avoided formulating their remonstration towards America’s advocacy for a ‘rules‑based liberal international order’ in binary or at least dichotomous terms.
At the same time, Moscow and Beijing and many others around the globe—including at least a few U.S. treaty allies— have reformulated (at least in their minds’ eye) the choice presented by the Biden Administration as involving one between adhering to a ‘rules‑based liberal international order’ and one more firmly or more fully or more centrally rooted in the UN Charter. A practical consequence of this sort of reformulation is the portrayal of the United States as the revisionist power, much like had been the case previously with Bush and Wilson.
Perhaps two of the most explicit versions of such a counterargument have been expressed by China’s Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, respectively. During the aforementioned talks in Alaska, Yang stated that “What China and the international community follow or uphold is the UN‑centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the socalled rules‑based international order. […] I do not think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion, and those countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.” A few months later, Lavrov stated in Kommersant (the statement was then reprinted in the pages of Russia in Global Affairs) that “by imposing the concept of a rules‑bases order, the West seeks to shift the conversation on key issues to the platforms of its liking, where no dissident voices can be heard. […] In doing so, the West deliberately shies away from spelling out the rules it purports to follow, just as it refrains from explaining why they are needed. […] When someone acts against the West’s will, it immediately responds with a groundless claim that ‘the rules have been broken’ […] and declares its ‘right to hold the perpetrators accountable.’”
The Biden Administration’s instinct may be simply to ignore or dismiss such and similar remonstrations. Surely, this would be a mistake—the authorial motives of those making them notwithstanding. Were it not to reflect studiously on them, it could more easily find itself embracing some of the more dangerous elements of the proposals from the 2000s with which we concluded the preparations to our little thought experiment (along with, perhaps, core elements of the spirit of the earlier moment in world politics to which we had referred earlier).
Already, the strategic implications of the Biden Administration’s official rhetoric on the subject of the Summit for Democracy leave the door open to that possibility. Closing it resolutely would seem to be in the U.S. national interest, if, that it, a proper measure of this interest may be understood to consist in ascertaining the likelihood of its garnering support from most of the states invited to as well as excluded from the Summit for Democracy—i.e., Russia, China, and others the Biden A d m i n i s t r a t i o n perceives to be autocratic. On the other hand, a failure to do so could leave it recklessly open to the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism, which, given the concatenations of present circumstances, could come to be judged by posterity as having constituted an act of geopolitical malpractice.
Renewal and Remedies
We may be said to be impelled to offer another type of conclusion to this little thought experiment by observing that, unlike Athens itself, neither Thucydides nor Xenophon judged the ambition of that city—exemplified through advocacy for or subornation of Atticism—as being either simply a natural right or a universal necessity. The closest a Thucydidean dramatis persona comes to making such a claim in speech is found near the end of the dialogue between the Athenian envoys and the Melians that is conducted in a setting that was less subjected to the rhetorical conventions of public messaging as may appear to be the case at first blush. Therein, the former “conclude that always, by a necessity of nature, [both the gods, reputedly, and human beings, manifestly] rule to the limits of their power. And it was not we who made this law, nor were we the first who finding it in force have submitted to it, but having found it in being, will leave it in being for all time to come. And so we submit to it, knowing that you and anyone else, coming into the same power as we have, would do the very same thing” (Thuc. V.105.1‑2). But “ruling to the limits of [a city’s] power,” which the Athenians basically identify both as a natural right and a universal necessity, is hardly the same as ruling to the limits of a city’s ambition, much less ruling to beyond these same limits. In other words, the Athenians mistake ambition for power: advocating or suborning Atticism is neither a natural right nor a universal necessity. This explains why Thucydides shows in his account that it was predominantly the seemingly free actions of the Athenians—in contradistinction to the reactions of others, including in the strict sense the onset of the war (see, e.g., Thuc. I.23.6, I.86.5, I.88, I.118.2, and I.139.1‑4)—that led first to the transformation of a defensive alliance against Persia into a tribute system resulting in the “imperial greatness of Athens” and then to everything that came afterwards (the phrase in quotation marks is used by Christopher Bruell in a 1974 American Political Science Review article). The result of that everything—which involved honor as much as, if not more than, fear or interest (cf. the placement of ‘honor’ in the list spoken by the Athenians at I.75.3 with the one in the immediate sequel at I.76.2)— may be said to have produced what amounts to a tragedy, in the sense that the outcome of the conflict about which Thucydides and Xenophon write with authority was both the opposite of what had been intended by its chief advocates and a necessary consequence of the sum total of their overambitious actions and especially those of their political progeny.
Substantial corroborating evidence in support of all this may be collected by comparing the justifications offered by Pericles in his funeral oration with those of his valedictory speech. The action of the latter takes place in a situation of crisis brought on at least in part by pestilence; in that speech, he explicitly and repeatedly adds a reputational dimension to his earlier arguments regarding the necessity or inevitability of war or upheaval or motion. This, in turn, requires him to admit or at least to allow for the possibility that the Athenian course of action was not right or just. For instance: “It is no longer possible to step down […]. It may have been unjust to acquire, but [..] it is [now] dangerous to let go” (Thuc. II.63.2; cf. I.123.1 and the previous parenthetic regarding the shift of honor from first to second place in the earlier speeches of the Athenians to the Spartans—speeches that were made prior to the two Periclean speeches just mentioned). Thus, to his earlier argument that at stake is the preservation of Athenian freedom and security, Pericles adds in his valedictory the argument that a failure to keep pursuing the undertaken course of action will result in the humiliation of Athens—in a loss of its renown (a concept that, as it happens, incorporates elements of honor, fear, and interest).
Now, to this we may add that in the world of Greek tragedy, the arc of history does not bend towards justice, as it were: it knows no pity, listens to no excuses, and hears no complaints, to paraphrase Kurt Riezler. To the extent that justice is a theme in that world (which could not be said to have been simply the world of Thucydides, perhaps because his account ends before the conflict itself does), its character or nature is less determinant than its worldly weakness.
The political philosopher who most directly discoursed on how the worldly weakness of justice or right may be overcome was said by Leo Strauss in Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) to have been insensitive to the “sacredness of ‘the common.’” This same political philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, is also reputed to have been a teacher of evil, which from certain perspectives can be said to be not altogether untrue. What may very well be more generally true, however, is captured well by a traditional Swahili saying that Julius Nyerere was fond of relating to foreign audiences: “when the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” Would it not follow from this that whatever sensible measures the elephants may take to safeguard the grass will end up being beneficial to both the elephants and the grass? (An analogous point can be made with reference to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 “grand chessboard” allegory: in chess, two players control all the pieces on the board; none of the pieces can ever have independent agency.) The presumed hoped‑for answer could be said to be exposed at least to this evident difficulty: safeguarding the grass may require the elephants to cease moving. Thucydides wrote that his book concerned the greatest ever upheaval or motion because it affected all of Hellas (which at the time of writing was understood to be at its peak) and a significant part of the barbarians and thus, “so to speak, all of mankind” (Thuc. I.1.2; cf. Pl. Rep. 368e6). Now, of course, the opposite of motion is rest: Thucydides implies that he could not have written at least a substantial part of his book without the forced rest of exile, which in turn afforded him both the leisure and opportunity to gain access to observe the motion of both sides (see V.26.5). Rest is more a characteristic of peace, motion of war. Thucydides knew of both and concluded, sensibly, that one without the other is impossible. On such a basis did he claim to present an authoritative account of political life simply—of what Strauss called in The City and Man (1964) the “interplay” of rest and motion and what Thucydides himself said was “searching for the truth” (I.20.3). What he could not do was to present an account of rest without motion or one of motion without rest: the nature of politics, he seems to say, is contained in the interplay of rest and motion. We repeat on the authority of Thucydides that neither perpetual peace nor perpetual war is possible; from this it necessarily follows that total victory in or through either peace or war is impossible. This, if true, would necessarily render the actualization of the universal and homogeneous state impossible.
Two suspicions may rise to the mind presently: does such an account not raise the question of whether the proverbial elephants can simply cease to move—whether, in other words, they can be at sempiternal rest? Is not the relationship between the elephants and the grass at least somewhat analogous to what the Athenians say to the Melians? And what they say in part is this: “claims of justice are adjudicated in human speech only where the parties are subject to equal compulsion; while those who have the upper hand do as they are able, and the weak make way for them” (Thuc. V.89). A looser and thus misleading although better‑known translation of the same passage reads: “As the world goes, right is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” But this second translation does not correspond to what is actually written in the original Thucydidean text. Appreciating the superior fidelity of the first translation to the original makes it harder if not impossible for the reader to interpret the speech by the Athenian envoys as stating or implying that they claim there is no right or justice; and that they believe that a precondition of a consideration of justice in politics is equality of constraint or compulsion or power. Furthermore, appreciating the accuracy of that first translation helps the reader to understand that the Athenian envoys in the speech quoted above neither deny the tension between right or justice and power or might, nor simply equate them. In other words, the Athenian argument in that speech is “not that Athens and Melos are equally just, but that [the] superior power [of the Athenians] must silence the superior justice of the Melians”—to cite the interpretation provided by Clifford Orwin in The Humanity of Thucydides (1994). “Justice prevails only among equals in power— among such equals, not justice but equality in power prevails. Where right reigns, just as where it does not, it defers to compulsion,” Orwin further clarifies.
Thus armed, we can recognize that Thucydides too discoursed on how the weakness of right may be overcome, albeit less directly than Machiavelli. We can also recognize here an illustration of the Straussian statement that Thucydides has a “sense of the sacredness of ‘the common’” as well as his remark, published much later, that “all people of judgment and taste feel” an “admiration” for Thucydides. This may help to explain why he was never reputed to be a teacher of evil. Yet, paradoxically, it would seem that he was more, not less, circumspect on how (or even whether) the weakness of right may be overcome, perhaps because he was more concerned with the character or nature of justice rather than, as was Machiavelli, with the manipulation of worldly conditions that could “remedy” the weakness of right and thus lead to its eventual strengthening, for this last would require the wherewithal “to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity” (NM, P. 15). On this basis we could conclude that any speeches and deeds concerning the ‘renewal of democracy’ are less universal and thus less inherently choiceworthy than speeches and deeds concerning the renewal of justice because only by doing the latter would a “sense of the sacredness of ‘the common’” be able to be put on public display and, in turn, be subjected to proper scrutiny and thus judgment. (We could also reproduce Strauss’ judgment that “Pericles was indeed dedicated wholeheartedly to the common good of the city but to its common good unjustly understood. He did not realize that the unjust understanding of the common good is bound to undermine dedication to the common good however understood”). Further corroborating evidence in support of this last can be introduced with recourse to Thucydides’ explicit judgment, made near the very end of his work, that “now most of all, for the first time at least in my lifetime, the Athenians appear to have enjoyed a good regime. For there was a judicious [or rightful] blending of the few and the many, and this is what first enabled the city to raise itself out of its wretched circumstances” (Thuc. VIII.97.2). The likely incompatibility of this good regime with the one that produced the chief advocates and political progeny of the conflict at issue should almost go without saying; as should the fact that what is conceivably Thucydides’ definition of statecraft—“to know how to remain moderate in prosperity and take care that the state grows concurrently in security as in renown” (Thuc. VIII.24.4)—is given in an explicitly non‑Athenian context.
We may observe that Strauss makes reference to some of this in a posthumously published article on Thucydides’ work that may advance our present consideration in at least two ways. First, the restoration of hope for Athens’ salvation can be brought about only through a connection or conspiracy involving the founders of the good regime and Pericles’ nephew and ward—that is to say, one of his progeny in more ways than one whom, uncoincidentally, Strauss qualifies without reservation as a man of “unquestioned predominance,” notwithstanding what we might call his Machiavellian notoriety. Second, this Athenian hope, as other hopes spoken of by Thucydides, came to naught—but not through the fault of the nephew. The reasons for this are told by Xenophon in the Hellenica and are thus not strictly speaking part of the world of Thucydides. In this way, the latter’s emphasis may be said to have remained on the aforementioned conspiracy or connection and not on the coming to naught of the hope for the salvation of Athens.
Nonetheless, a hint with respect to where Thucydides himself stands on the latter subject may be found in a passage from his lengthiest comment on any aspect of the war of the Spartans and the Athenians (and their respective affiliates or subordinates) and how they waged it against each other. The immediate context is Thucydides’ judgment that in times of civil discord there occurs such harsh things as “have been and will be always, so long as there is the same nature of human beings.” In the immediate sequel he then makes a general statement: “in times of peace and prosperity both cities and individuals have minds of a better cast, from not falling subject to overwhelming necessities. But war, filching away the easy provision of the everyday, is a violent teacher, which brings most men’s tempers level with their fortunes” (Thuc. III.82.2).
We could draw to a close our little thought experiment with a tentative suggestion: uncovering whether there is a way in which to effectuate the cessation of elephantine movement, such that the safeguarding of both the animal and the plant would be the result, ought to entail the conduct of a fully‑fledged inquiry into the teaching contained in the Thucydidean text (together with its Xenophontic sequel) and the two books that Machiavelli says contain everything he knows: The Prince and the Discourses. That tentative suggestion leads to another: the charge of advocating or suborning Atticism may perhaps be removed, or at least more properly addressed; and the greatness of the sort to which we referred above may perhaps be preserved, or at least salvaged.
Impracticable would be such an attempt now and in these pages. For present purposes it is sufficient to put forward—less but still somewhat tentatively—an interrogatory. Might perhaps an important difference between the Athenians then and the Biden Administration now be, as Thucydides writes, that the representatives of the former (in the form of the Athenians at Melos, at any rate) claim both to be used to hearing that their empire must one day end and that this prospect was not unsettling to them? A proper explication of this questions would surely require working through the hypothesis that the Athenians as depicted by Thucydides (at least in certain moments) were more prepared to consider making proper use of the sort of “remedies” to which Machiavelli points than the Biden Administration would be willing to be in both speech and deed. And this would, in turn, require us to consider, at a minimum, the interplay Machiavelli describes between necessity, fortune, virtue, and, as he sometimes does, opportunity.
To do any of this now would invariably take us much too far beyond the confines of what we had announced at the onset to be a little thought experiment on the strategic implications of the Biden Administration’s official rhetoric on the subject of the Summit for Democracy and the opening this may provide for leveling a charge of advocating or suborning Atticism. Still, we beg indulgence for reproducing one final statement, contained in a passage taken from a series of lectures Riezler delivered in 1953 on the topic of “political decisions in modern society,” which were published in the journal Ethics early in the following year and that we had earlier paraphrased in part: “History knows no pity. I have seen in a long life empires crumble, nations being defeated and yet in the last moment being saved by mistakes of the enemy, others surviving against all odds by sheer staying power and the capacity to endure. History listens to no excuses; it did not help anybody in the past and will not help anybody in a still more cruel future to point at public opinion, too powerful to resist; [or] at mass‑emotions, though natural and understandable and the offsprings of moral conviction. Pitiless history simply does not listen; it does not hear complaints and excuses after the event.”
