“The world has never been a level playing field, and everything costs.” Those were the words of the distinguished American historian David Landes (1998, 6). Good leaders understand Landes’ axiom quite well, but ideologues cannot and will not avail themselves to this most intellectually basic and practical wisdom in front of them.
While the former takes national sovereignty to mean survival, the latter prefers to nurse comfortably on the pregnant nipples of ideology. While good leaders understand and focus on the practices of power in a world of raison d’état, the ideologues are content to bask in the metaphysical and glorious abstractions of moralism.
Today, we see this divide between President Ali, who knows that international politics is driven by power-politics, versus Aubrey Norton whom, though waxing theoretical, has forgotten the basic lessons of The Melian Dialogue.
Non-specialists should get some context. The Melian Dialogue is a passage in A History of the Peloponnesian War (by Thucydides) about ancient Greece. In that war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenians approach the island of Melos and offer them security in exchange for coming under Athenian protection. The idea was to prevent Melos from becoming an ally of Sparta (Lacedaemonians). The leaders of Melos (Melians) reject the Athenian proposal, saying it would be “criminal cowardice” to give up their sovereignty.
The Athenians warn them that they should not mistake words for power, and specifically advise that “[t]he most successful people are those who stand up to their equals, behave properly to their superiors, and treat their inferiors fairly.”
The Melians rejected the Athenian offer based on principles of honour and pride. The Athenians came back and destroyed Melos. “[…The Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves; subsequently they sent out five hundred settlers and colonized the island.”
This famous lesson in the dynamics of realpolitik has escaped the likes of Aubrey Norton and GHK Lall. They, like the Melians, are beholden to ideological purity, insisting on multilateralism and other ideas and regimes of international relations. I have had reasons before to differentiate between international relations and international politics. While the former is the product of multi-state negotiated agreements, the latter is about the raw exercise of power where a particular actor has a preponderance of coercive capabilities and is willing to use them.
Regional security in the Caribbean Basin is now in the balance. President Ali is a political realist and his actions are based on protection of the national interest. We do what we must is the motto. For Mr. Norton, GHK Lall, and other purists, the preferred position is one based on sentimentalism.
I close with a warning the Athenians gave to the Melians more than two thousand years ago: “Surely you will not fall back on the idea of honour, which has been the ruin of so many when danger and disgrace were staring them in the face. How often, when men have seen the fate to which they were tending, have they been enslaved by a phrase and drawn by the power of this seductive word to fall of their own free will into irreparable disaster, bringing on themselves by their folly a greater dishonour than fortune could inflict!”
And remember Landes’ “The world has never been a level playing field…” You see, in international politics, you either learn, or perish.
Dr Randy Persaud is Adviser in the Office of the President & Director of the National Defence Institute.