SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Here is what the Melian Dialogue actually teaches, read completely and honestly. The Athenians were right about power in the short term.

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2090510687965716726

Here is what the Melian Dialogue actually teaches, read completely and honestly.

The Athenians were right about power in the short term.

They destroyed Melos. The logic held. The weak suffered what they must.

The Melians were right about something the Athenians couldn't see.

That a civilization that operates purely on the logic of power, that destroys the Meloses it encounters, that cannot conceive of restraint except as weakness, that civilization generates enemies faster than it generates allies, overextends faster than it builds, and eventually collapses under the weight of its own logic.

The Athenians were realists.

They were also finished within a generation.

China has read this history.

China's strategic tradition, from Sun Tzu forward, is not about being less ruthless than Athens.

It is about understanding that the most durable power is the power that doesn't need to be exercised visibly. That the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. That strategic patience compounds in ways that strategic aggression cannot.

This is not weakness. This is a different and in many respects superior strategic tradition that has governed the longest-continuous civilization in human history.

The United States is 250 years old.

China is, depending on how you count, 4,000 years old.

Perhaps the country that has survived that long, through everything history threw at it, without disappearing, the Mongols, the colonial century, civil war, revolution, perhaps that country understands something about durability that a 250-year-old hyperpower, currently spending itself into debt while its infrastructure crumbles, has not yet learned.

The Melian Dialogue is 2,500 years old.

China was already 1,500 years old when it was written.

Think about what it means to invoke ancient wisdom at a civilization that predates your ancient wisdom.

Quote

Richard Medhurst

@richimedhurst

Aug 20

To be perfectly blunt, China simply aren't ruthless enough to outfox the United States — no matter how large their economy gets.

History is full of extremely wealthy, neutral powers who were wiped out — or who only survived by becoming sharks themselves.

Such is the game.