Proxy Wars From Sparta to Ukraine and Gaza – WSJ

Paul Rahe is one of the world s top scholars of ancient military history. When we meet, he wants to talk about war in the present tense: Russia s invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas pogrom in Israel and China s covetous eye on Taiwan.

Mr. Rahe, 74, is a professor of history and Western heritage at Hillsdale College, a private liberal-arts school 100 miles west of Detroit. He likens Vladimir Putin s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine to Athens s attempt to conquer Sicily from 415-13 B.C. And he says it makes as much sense for the U.S. to back Ukraine as it did for the Spartans to help Sicily which is to say, it s a no-brainer.

For Mr. Rahe, antiquity isn t merely academic. Embedded within it are maps that can help us sidestep present-day minefields and steer us toward common sense and smart strategy. These are qualities he finds in short supply on America s isolationist right, in whose ranks he includes Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. (He admits of Mr. Trump that I held my nose and voted for him in 2020. )

Mr. Rahe believes that the Athenian and Russian invasions, 2,436 years apart, were both acts of madness and greedy overreach as well as expressions of an erotic desire for grandeur. The aggressors not only scorned the resolve of their targets the Syracusans of Sicily and the Ukrainians, respectively but also overestimated their own capacities and chances of success. For the Athenian leaders, the allure of Sicily was so great that they ignored logistical difficulties of waging war on an island 800 nautical miles away. Mr. Putin didn t ever ask himself what could go wrong.

via www.wsj.com

Tunku Varadarajan.