*Originally published in 2021. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

Despite twenty years and two trillion dollars, the Afghan government fell in a matter of days following the US military pullback in August 2021. The media exploded into a maelstrom of finger pointing and hand wringing; a photograph of a Chinook helicopter above the US Embassy provided a visual suture with the fall of Saigon. It’s déjà vu all over again. More reflective articles strived to provide some nuance, but these and other attempts at lessons learned are swept away in the deluge. What can be better understood, however, is how the astonishment at the fall, the rush to judgment, and perhaps the mission failure itself reflect habits of imperial abstraction, moral displacement, and hubris. This article draws on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a canonical text in International Relations (IR), to foreground these three habits—deeply embedded in the rhetoric of classical realism, but also attributes of Western imperialism. They coalesce as part of a political discourse—a way of speaking, thinking, acting, reacting, knowing, and not-knowing—but also operate piecemeal and usually on behalf of not paying attention.

In 2020, the major US television networks devoted a total of five minutes to Afghanistan (Lobe, 2021). Whether the failure at nation building in Afghanistan was due to misguided idealism or not, and whether media commentators have been consistent in their coverage before and after the fall or not, the long acquiescence to the occupation and quick reactions at its demise reflect a shared inattentiveness that is discursively constructed. Thucydides’ provides a mirror that can reflect these specific tendencies in imperial power as it manifests across a spectrum from theoretical debate to democratic public opinion.

According to some in IR, it’s time to move on. More than time: As Edward Keene (2015, 366) observes, “the critical literature, for all its undoubtedly penetrating insight into the History of the Peloponnesian War, does not, however, seriously challenge the grip that Thucydides still exerts on the historical imagination of international relations” To the critics, Thucydides represents flawed conventions, tired pedagogy, and intellectual complacency. The world today is not the Greek (Athenian) world of the fifth century BCE, universalism is itself an imperial power move, difference and standpoint matter, and disciplinary knowledge should be decentered. We agree. Even so, attention to failure—in both politics and inquiry—cautions against scrapping resources for critical analysis. Indeed, the history of interpretation of the History provides an impressive review of the importance and complexity of the text (cf. Kouskouvelis, 2019; Allison,2018; Johnson, 2015; Keene, 2015; Williams, 2013; Moylon, 2013 Monten, 2006; Clark, 1993; Welch, 2003; Strassler, 1996; Bagby, 1994; Doyle, 1990; Garst, 1989; Alker 1988).

These accounts also demonstrate how disciplinary appropriations have included both radical simplifications and nuanced theoretical arguments, so much so that Thucydides now can also be understood to be a critic of political realism (cf. Rahe, 2007; Ahrensdorf, 1995; Forde, 1995) and one model for constructivist theory (cf. Jaffe, 2017; Zumbrunnen, 2015; Lebow, 2001).

We find the critique of realism—and particularly as it is supported by scholarship in classics (e.g., Connor 1984)—to be decisive, but something else is at stake here. Whether labeled “realism,” “imperialism,” or something else, the History displays specific discursive tropes that still are deployed to rationalize power and failures of power. Unlike the tight composition of that text, however, these tropes are dispersed over time and throughout public culture. They become habits, not stratagems; reflexes, not decisions. And those who use them benefit from this lack of awareness. One result is that it then is easy to look past them in Thucydides’ text. In what follows, we review a well-known episode to identify some contemporary habits of inattention.

The Paradigmatic Scene: Athenian Generals at Melos

Melos is the paradigmatic scene, the ideal type: the place where one can see in starkest outline the logic of self-interested domination in a state of nature, the harsh discipline of rational calculations of power, and the folly of relying instead on aspirational factors such as civic values and common moral decency. The narrative simplicity of the dialogue can be misleading, however. As Robert Connor (1984, 147-157) has demonstrated, setting the scene within the themes and narrative of the History shifts the implied author’s perspective from that of either objective documentation or theoretical endorsement to a critical stance: we observe the Melians make the wrong decision, and how the Athenians are turning into tyrants. The History becomes a story of how the Athenians became power maximizers, and how they learned that lesson so well that they lost their national identity, their capacity to make good political decisions, and the war (cf. Connor, 1984, 156-157).

Realist valorization of the dialogue has depended on a less contextual reading. In between these two interpretations, the Melian Dialogue has still more to teach us. One reason the scene has become paradigmatic is that it so quickly transcends its historical location. The scene is geared for abstraction. Its variation from Thucydides’ usual compositional techniques is the first clue—not least by anonymizing the speakers—and these stylistic changes affect a modal shift, a change in validity conditions of the sort affected by a trope. The reader is being moved into a conception of international politics that is fundamentally abstract; in doing so, it reveals some of how abstraction can become a mentality that displaces moral values and carries illicit motives. Abstraction is unavoidable, of course, but it is not innocent (Krishna, 2001; van Wingerden, 2017; Behr and Kirke, 2014). As the generals are the........

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