“Might Makes Right” Will Not Be Effective, Even in the Western Hemisphere

“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must” is a quote that has come down through the ages from the Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, written in 416 BC. It has come to encapsulate the “might makes right” philosophy in international relations and is embraced by some in the realist school of foreign policy.

Such realists are mostly right about how the world still works, but have a PR problem in today’s milieu of woke platitudes in international relations. Despite the fact that the balance of power and spheres of influence still shape the worldview of the vast majority of global leaders, some of these strong countries usually dress up the reasons for their military interventions in terms of democratization, humanitarian ends, or their national security. If America didn’t invent advertising, Madison Avenue certainly perfected it. So, because the American population has been inculcated into idealistic conceptions of government, military, and commercial motivations, such excuses are piled higher and deeper when the United States uses its military overseas, as it has more than any other country on the globe after World War II. Leaders of less democratic countries don’t have to be quite as coy with their justifications: To excuse his invasion, Vladimir Putin simply said that Ukraine is not a real country and thus has no right to exist in Russia’s near abroad.

Yet when the United States intervened in Somalia in the early 1990s, it claimed a humanitarian purpose but then sought to alter the country’s internal politics. When America attacked Serbia in 1999, its leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was compared to Adolf Hitler, as was Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi when the U.S. attacked Libya in 2011. And when the U.S. invaded Iraq, the threat from Saddam Hussein was compared to that of Adolf Hitler, who had weapons of mass destruction (which were never found), and who had to be removed to institute democracy in that country by force. And these are just some of the lame justifications for a superpower intervening over time, simply because it has the power to do so.

Donald Trump has tried to use this sleight of hand, too, but always ends up saying the quiet part out loud. At first, it was to get rid of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro because he was an evil, oppressive drug trafficker, but then, after Trump had done it, he talked more about grabbing Venezuelan oil through a deal cut with remnants of the same repressive social regime. 

Now, Trump is claiming that the United States needs “complete and total control” of Greenland, the semiautonomous territory of its loyal Danish ally, or its national security will not be complete. And this from a man who regularly stamps his name on buildings that he doesn’t own or control. Also, since the United States has provided Greenland’s security from Hitler’s threat during World War II right up to the present, and the United States already has a large military base on its soil, the claim that the United States needs to control Greenland is preposterous.

From his text message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, it seems that the real reason that Trump is threatening Denmark’s Greenland is that he wants the rare minerals under vast amounts of ice, or because the Norwegian Nobel Committee stiffed him in getting a Nobel Peace Prize. (I guess he thinks all Scandinavian countries were in on the snub.)

Getting back to Thucydides, he wrote the previously quoted phrase when the powerful and democratic Athenians demanded that the neutral island of Melos join their empire. When the peaceful Melos declined based on “fairness,” the Athenians answered that the strong rule and then massacred all the Melian men and enslaved the women and children. 

Trump’s threat that the United States will militarily attack the 56,000 peaceful people of Greenland on whim seems perilously similar to the “might makes right” doctrine of the ancient Athenians. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.

In my book, A Balance of Titans: Peace and Liberty in the New Multipolar World, I recognize the continuing reality that great powers have spheres of influence and advocate that those countries have a conclave to clearly demarcate those spheres to keep a balance of power among the powers to reduce the chances of a major war in a nuclear-armed world. Trump’s focus of U.S. foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere would be an improvement if he hadn’t reverted to the raw imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the lead-up to World War II, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt adopted a “Good Neighbor” policy toward the Western Hemisphere—adopting the approach taught by mothers everywhere to their children: you get more with sugar than with vinegar (especially in the long run). That U.S. policy helped get almost universal support from Latin American countries against Nazi penetration there.

The United States could adopt this policy as an example for other great powers when policing their already existing spheres of influence. Trump’s policy seems to be going in the opposite direction.