What Thucydides Could Really Teach Trump

The Trump administration’s embrace of coercion, transactional alliance politics and performative displays of strength is often defended as hard-headed realism in an unforgiving international system. Key figures within President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy team have explicitly invoked a stripped-down and distorted reading of Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War to legitimise this approach, treating the dictum that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ as timeless wisdom rather than as a warning about its consequences. In fact, Thucydides did not celebrate such logic, but rather traced how Athens’ growing reliance on intimidation hollowed out the foundations of its power. The contrast he draws between Periclean grand strategy and the later coercive turn exemplified by the Melian Dialogue shows how unrestrained power corrodes both international influence and domestic cohesion. Focused on Trump’s foreign policy, the Thucydidean lens illuminates the strategic costs of the coercive approach. Power exercised without restraint may compel compliance in the short term, but ultimately accelerates resistance, balancing behaviour and strategic decline.