Destined for War: Ancient Greece and the Shadow Over the Twenty-First Century

 

A friend with deep connections in China recommended Graham Allison's Destined for War after President Xi Jinping warned President Trump that the United States and China were falling into the "Thucydides Trap." Xi spoke confidently about a Greek historian who died twenty-four centuries ago. Trump appeared unfamiliar with both the history and the warning. Watching him respond to Xi, Trump seemed to be willing to dive into the Thucydides Trap rather than just fall into it. That exchange vividly displayed that ideas born in ancient Athens still shape the diplomacy of the twenty-first century.

Destined for War asks a question that has haunted statesmen for nearly 2,500 years: What happens when a rising power challenges an established one? Drawing on the insight of the Greek historian Thucydides, Allison argues that such moments create enormous structural pressures that can make war more likely—not inevitable, but dangerously plausible. His book is both a work of history and a warning directed at the relationship between the United States and China. If you follow the link above you will see Allison's Thucydides Trap project at Harvard.

The concept at the heart of the book is the "Thucydides Trap," named for Thucydides' explanation of the Peloponnesian War. Writing about the conflict between Athens and Sparta, he observed that it was "the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Allison examines sixteen historical cases in which a rising power confronted an established one, showing that many ended in war while others escaped it through exceptional diplomacy, restraint, or luck.

I read The History of the Peloponnesian War in translation and studied portions of it in the original Greek. I found Allison's treatment of Thucydides both thorough and engaging. He avoids reducing the ancient historian to a slogan. Instead, he demonstrates how Thucydides analyzed fear, honor, ambition, miscalculation, and political leadership—forces that remain as relevant today as they were in the fifth century B.C.

When Destined for War was published in 2017, the United States still largely understood itself as the defender of the liberal international order. Allison's analysis therefore assumed a strategic competition between an established democratic superpower and an increasingly powerful authoritarian China. Reading the book today, however, reminds me how much the world has changed. The international landscape has shifted, and so has American politics. The structural rivalry Allison describes remains, but the political assumptions underlying his analysis are very different than when the book was published. Trump admires dictators and undermines democracy at home and in foreign policy.  

The book's greatest strength is its insistence that history is not destiny. The Thucydides Trap is a warning, not a prophecy. Structural pressures matter, but leaders still make choices. Misjudgment, arrogance, fear, and nationalism can accelerate conflict; prudence, communication, and strategic imagination can help avoid it.

What makes the book unsettling is not that Allison predicts war, but that he demonstrates how intelligent leaders throughout history have stumbled into wars they neither wanted nor expected. Thucydides understood that nations often drift toward catastrophe through a series of decisions that seem reasonable at the time.

For me, Destined for War was more than an exercise in strategic analysis. It was painful to read because Thucydides has long been one of my favorite historians. To see an ancient warning become part of the political vocabulary of our own age—and to watch leaders in both Washington and Beijing invoke it—is to recognize that under Trump we are a declining power because he ignores history in his arrogant ignorance. 

Allison cannot tell us whether the United States will avoid the Thucydides Trap. But he reminds us why understanding history matters. The first great historian still has something urgent to say to the twenty-first century, and we ignore him at our peril.

A Day at the Imperial War Museum Duxford

 

One of the highlights of my recent visit to England was a bicycle ride from Cambridge to the Imperial War Museum Duxford, one of the finest aviation museums I have ever visited. Housed on the historic airfield from which RAF fighter squadrons flew during the Battle of Britain, Duxford is much more than a museum. It is a living airfield where history still flies.

My visit began with an unexpected thrill. A beautifully restored Bristol Blenheim taxied past, its twin Bristol Mercury radial engines producing a sound that transported me back to newsreels of the early years of World War II. Soon afterward, a Supermarine Spitfire taxied onto the runway, accelerated, and lifted gracefully into the sky. Seeing a Spitfire fly from an active wartime airfield was one of those rare experiences that no photograph or film can truly capture. It was easy to imagine the young RAF pilots who once took off from the same runway to defend Britain.

I spent the remainder of the day exploring Duxford's five major exhibition halls, each offering a different chapter in aviation history. Together they present an extraordinary survey of British aviation, from the fragile aircraft of the First World War through the Battle of Britain, the jet age, and the Cold War.

As impressive as the British collection is, I was equally surprised by the museum's remarkable display of American aircraft. Few museums outside the United States possess such a comprehensive collection. The American Air Museum houses iconic aircraft spanning nearly the entire twentieth century, including fighters, bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cargo planes, helicopters, and Cold War strategic aircraft. Walking beneath these machines provides a vivid reminder of the enormous industrial and technological effort that shaped the outcome of World War II and the decades that followed.

Unlike many museums where aircraft are displayed as isolated exhibits, Duxford presents them within the broader story of military aviation. The exhibits explain not only how airplanes evolved but also how they transformed warfare, strategy, and the lives of the men and women who flew and maintained them. Restoration workshops visible to visitors further emphasize that preserving aviation history is an ongoing craft rather than simply displaying artifacts behind ropes.

Perhaps what impressed me most was the atmosphere of the place. Because Duxford remains an operating airfield, the museum never feels static. The sound of aircraft engines, the sight of airplanes moving across the taxiways, and the possibility that a historic aircraft might suddenly take flight create an experience unlike any conventional museum.

For anyone interested in military history, engineering, or aviation, the Imperial War Museum Duxford is an extraordinary destination. It combines the history of the Royal Air Force, the remarkable contribution of American air power, and the excitement of seeing historic aircraft still alive and flying. For me, the ride from Cambridge and the day spent at Duxford became one of the most memorable experiences of my visit to England.

Reading Robert Alter: The Psalms and the Wisdom Books

 

Over the past year I have read two of Robert Alter's remarkable translations of the Hebrew Bible: The Book of Psalms and, more recently, The Wisdom Books. Together they have reinforced my conviction that the best biblical translations are usually the work of a single gifted scholar rather than a committee.

Committee translations inevitably smooth away differences. Their goal is broad acceptance, which often means compromise. A single translator, by contrast, can preserve a coherent literary vision. Whether one agrees with every choice or not, the reader encounters a distinct mind wrestling with an ancient text. Robert Alter is such a translator.

Alter approaches the Hebrew Bible first as literature. His translations are attentive to rhythm, repetition, wordplay, and imagery, qualities that are often flattened in more familiar English versions. Reading his Psalms reminded me that these are not simply devotional texts but poems of extraordinary beauty, emotional range, and literary craftsmanship. Joy, despair, thanksgiving, anger, hope, and doubt all find expression in language that feels both ancient and surprisingly fresh.

The Wisdom Books extends that accomplishment. Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes emerge not merely as religious documents but as sustained reflections on how human beings should live in a world that is often perplexing and unjust. Alter allows each work to retain its own distinctive voice. Proverbs celebrates practical wisdom and disciplined living. Job confronts undeserved suffering with relentless honesty. Ecclesiastes questions almost every human certainty while continuing the search for meaning. Reading them together reveals not a single philosophy but an ongoing conversation about the human condition.

For me, one of the greatest pleasures of Alter's work lies in the extensive footnotes. They are not interruptions but companions to the text. His commentary illuminates linguistic subtleties, historical background, literary structure, and alternative translations without overwhelming the reader. Again and again, I found myself learning something new—not only about ancient Hebrew but about why a particular phrase has echoed through centuries of Jewish and Christian interpretation.

These books are far more than translations. They are invitations to read the Hebrew Scriptures as great literature while respecting their religious significance. Alter combines the skills of a philologist, literary critic, historian, and teacher, producing editions that reward slow, careful reading.

For readers willing to linger over both the biblical text and Alter's insightful annotations, The Book of Psalms and The Wisdom Books offer a richer encounter with Scripture than almost any modern translation I have read. They remind us that the Bible is not only a sacred text but one of the foundational works of world literature.

America's 250th Anniversary vs. the Bicentennial

 

My tank, Bad Bitch, on a tank trail on Fort Carson, Colorado, July 1976.

On July 4th 1976 I was in a tank in the desert training area on Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  Our unit, 1st Battalion/70th Armor, just began two months of field training before we deployed with our entire brigade to Wiesbaden, West Germany.  

When we drove the tanks on roads, many of us clipped 13-star colonial flags on our radio antennas. Many of our 54 tanks and one-hundred-plus support vehicles flew the flags celebrating our bicentennial.  

I was 23 years old and excited at the prospect of living in another country.  More than that, our alert area was in Fulda on the East-West border between the two Germanys.  We were being sent as a full mechanized combat brigade of 4,000 soldiers to show America was still committed to NATO and Europe despite our recent troubles.  

Those alive during America's bicentennial will remember a nation beset by riots and terror bombings.  In 1974 President Nixon resigned in  disgrace.  In 1975, we abandoned Saigon and lost our ill-fated war in Vietnam, abandoning our allies.  Our economy was a mess with high inflation and gas shortages.  

Yet, we survived and thrived. Today we are in another series of crises with leaders far more corrupt and foolish.  We just lost another war we started (much quicker this time) but I am planning to celebrate our nation just as I did 50 years ago.

The Declaration of Independence remains the greatest and most influential political document in history.  

Happy 250th America!!

Nazi Death Camps and C.S. Lewis

Emily, Me and Cliff

Since 2017, I have visited sixteen different Nazi death camps in Germany, Poland, Czechia and France.  A few of them twice.  I have also visited Holocaust memorials including Yad Vashem and the Deportation Memorial in Paris on the same island as Notre Dame Cathedral.  Since 1977, I have read all the works of C.S. Lewis, many of them several times.  When I visited death camps, it is with a mind very much formed by Lewis’s view of the world.  Lewis did not write about the camps or the Holocaust, but he has given me the ability to tour the camps and learn the details of the torture and murder committed in these places and maintain my sanity. 

The three books in particular are in the back of my mind if not in conscious thought when I visit Nazi death camps. They are The Four Loves, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. The first death camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In 2017, I rode a bicycle to the city of Oswiecim from Belgrade the continued on to Lviv, Ukraine. I learned from reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder that Auschwitz was the center of industrial murder of Jews. Lviv was the place where the Nazis did almost nothing. Residents of the city raped, robbed and murdered all the Jews in the city and disposed of the bodies.  My intention was to see the worst sites of the Holocaust. Then I flew to Israel and visited Yad Vashem.  I returned to Europe and spent a week with my best friend. He and I were roommates in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in the Cold War US military in the late 1970s.  I left the Army and went to college. Sgt Cliff Almes upon discharge joined the land of Kanaan Lutheran monastery in Darmstadt and became Bruder Timotheus. 

In the years since my first visits in 2017,  Cliff and I visited death camps together.  It was wrenching to go alone, but with Cliff, we could discuss what we saw afterwards.  In The Four Loves Lewis says the posture of friendship is side-by-side, sharing the same journey.  Cliff and I went to a dozen death camps together and also spent a week in Israel. Lewis says facing a hard task together is much better than facing it alone. (He also says shirking is best done with companions.) On our most recent journey Cliff and I were joined by a mutual friend who was deployed to Poland and got a four-day pass to join us.  I taught ESL with Emily a decade ago in Lancaster. She visited Kanaan in 2019. In 2020 she joined the Army and became a combat medic. She was running a medic team in Poland.  The three of us went to the Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek death camps.  A pair of friends can always be joined by another.

Every death camp different. Many people asked me why go to so many death camps? Because each death camp is unique. While the ultimate goal was death to the Jewish people and all deemed unfit to live by the Nazis, each camp was run differently.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau more than a million Jews from all over Europe were murdered: gassed or worked to death. It was also a huge slave labor camp.  Some inmates lived more than a year and survived their terrible confinement. Treblinka, by contrast, was death machine.  Trains ran back and forth from Warsaw to Treblinka.  Those on the train were murdered on arrival, and another train rolled in. More than 800,000 were murdered in just two years. Another contrast in these camps: Treblinka was hidden from view in a remote forest.  Auschwitz is right in the city of Oswiecim. One of the strangest things about visiting Auschwitz is hearing the church bells.  The Catholic Church is adjacent to the camp.

The camps were all run by human beings.  As I see the barracks, the gas chambers, the cremation ovens, the kitchens, the latrines, the guard towers, the work rooms, I see places that were run by men and women who had eternal souls.  The people who ran the camps were not another species of evil beings, they were no different from us in substance, just different in the way they chose to live their lives.  I am aware that choice is limited in a totalitarian regime, but there was resistance.  German police were mobilized in thousands to murder Jews with gunshots and shove them into mass graves.  Some few refused. They were allowed other duties. Lewis made clear there are no ordinary persons. We are all eternal. Including murderers of innocents. Someday they will join the queue for the tour bus.  If they board they will travel to the edge of Heaven and a victim of their crimes will make the long journey to offer them forgiveness.  How many will heed that offer?

Which brings me to the bespeckled embodiment of Nazi evil. A failed Austrian salesman with a talent for logistics who joined the Nazi Party in Germany soon after Adolph Hitler took power because he needed a job.  Adolph Eichmann became a Nazi official and by 1935 was organizing the deportation of Jews from the Reich. In an irony of obeying orders, Eichmann saved the lives of thousands of Jews by deporting them.  Many Jews wanted to leave but could not navigate the approvals necessary. Eichmann organized a large arena where all the agencies were under one roof, completing all the paperwork in a day or two.  The Jews he processed lost all their property but escaped with their lives. 

 When the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann was on hold for two years from late 1939 until early 1942 when the Final Solution became Nazi policy.  The same Eichmann who got Jews out of the Reich used his same logistic skill to round up Jews and send them to death camps. Eichmann took three million Jews from their homes and sent them to death camps.  He was efficient and thoughtless.  Screwtape, the mid-level bureaucrat in the lowerarchy of Hell does what his Father Below orders.  As I visit camps, I look at the rail sidings, the offices, the barracks, and feel the presence of clerks doing their jobs. Reading and rereading The Screwtape Letters I was amused by the wit that assembled these advice letters to Wormwood.  But the evil hovers there.  Eichmann was a small and vain man. When he did his job well he bragged and expected praise.  He would fit perfectly within Screwtape’s world. 

My friends Bruder Timotheus and Sergeant Emily Burgett are with me at Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald and all the other camps helping me to navigate the near-infinite evil of these camps. And C.S. Lewis is there also.

 

Elegy in Blue: Mark Helprin Still Believes in Heroes

Reading Mark Helprin’s Elegy in Blue feels like visiting an old friend, a friend who is clearly aging, (as am I) but still his brilliant self. Readers like me who have followed Helprin across four decades of novels know the territory well: a noble hero, a luminous woman, evil that must be confronted, and prose so beautiful and so funny that even ordinary scenes seem touched by poetry or stand up comedy. At age 78, Helprin remains unmistakably himself.

Any discussion of Elegy in Blue must begin with A Winter’s Tale (1983), the novel that established Helprin as one of America’s most distinctive writers. That extraordinary work of magical realism transformed New York City and the Hudson Valley into a mythic landscape inhabited by the unforgettable Peter Lake and the ethereal Beverly Penn. The novel, Helprin's second, stretched reality almost to the breaking point, yet somehow remained emotionally true and solid. It remains for me Helprin’s masterpiece and one of the most beautiful American novels of the last half century.

Much of Helprin’s later work has been more grounded (at least partially) in recognizable reality. Whether set in New York, Paris, the American West, or aboard a US Navy gunboat, his novels increasingly inhabit the world we know. Yet the essential Helprin vision remains unchanged. His heroes are honorable, capable men devoted to family, duty, beauty, and civilization itself. They are gentle when gentleness is called for and utterly ruthless when confronted by evil. His heroines are equally remarkable—intelligent, beautiful, courageous, and possessed of an almost impossible competence. Realistic they may not always be, but they are part of the moral universe Helprin has spent a lifetime creating.

In Paris in the Present Tense (2017), the seventy-five-year-old cellist Jules Lacour displayed a vigor and competence that seemed remarkable for a man of his age. Early in that novel, Lacour intervenes to stop Islamic terrorists from murdering an Orthodox Jew, killing two of the terrorists. Lacour escapes by swimming the Seine at night through barge and tour boat traffic. Beyond improbable, but devoted Helprin readers ride the wave of fantasy.

In Elegy in Blue, Helprin pushes the geriatric hero theme even further. His unnamed protagonist is eighty-two years old. Three years earlier, at seventy-nine, he intervened when a young Nazi who had volunteered with ISIS attacked students and parents at an Orthodox Shul in Brooklyn, killing seven before the protagonist ended the massacre by tackling the terrorist and breaking his neck, yet within Helprin’s fictional universe, it feels plausible.

What matters is not realism but aspiration. Helprin has spent his career writing about what human beings might be at their best. His heroes are embodiments of courage, loyalty, and moral clarity. In an age of antiheroes and moral ambiguity, Helprin continues to believe in heroism. 

The pleasures of Elegy in Blue are the pleasures that longtime readers have come to expect. The prose sparkles with wit and observation. The dialogue is intelligent and often very funny. The action unfolds with confidence. The final major action of the novel will surprise no one familiar with Helprin’s work, yet it remains deeply satisfying because it fulfills the promises the novel has been making from its opening pages.

As I read the book over a weekend, I found myself reflecting on the unusual trajectory of Helprin’s career. Many writers become more cynical with age, especially a writer with profoundly conservative politics who is a scholar at the Claremont institute. Helprin has remained remarkably consistent. He still believes in beauty, love, courage, and civilization. He still believes that evil exists and must be opposed. And he still writes as though great men and women walk among us.

Whether one accepts Helprin’s vision or not, there is no one else writing quite like him. The title says this is the final novel, but maybe there will be an 86-year-old who pushes a terrorist into the path of a Q train with his cane then disappears into the labyrinth of Atlantic Ave--Barclays Center Station.  

Elegy in Blue is not Heprin's greatest novel, it is the latest variation on themes he has been exploring since Refiner's Fire, his first novel.  For readers who have traveled with him through those decades, it is a welcome return to familiar ground and a reminder that Mark Helprin remains one of America’s great writers. 

Stalingrad: War and Peace for the Twentieth Century

Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is an ambitious novel, and remarkably, it succeeds in its vast ambition. When Grossman set out to tell the story of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazi Germany, he was consciously writing in the shadow of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. His goal was to create a twentieth-century epic that captured an entire society confronting war, suffering, sacrifice, and history. I first read this novel a decade ago and now rereading it, I am convinced that Grossman came as close as anyone ever has to achieving that goal.

Like Tolstoy, Grossman moves effortlessly between generals and laborers, scientists and soldiers, mothers and bureaucrats. The coming battle for Stalingrad forms the center of gravity for the novel, but the book is about far more than military operations. Grossman is interested in how ordinary people endure extraordinary circumstances. His characters argue, fall in love, worry about their children, struggle with political loyalty, and attempt to preserve their humanity as the machinery of war closes around them.

One of the great strengths of Stalingrad is that Grossman never loses sight of the immense scale of the conflict while maintaining his focus on individual lives. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of history’s decisive military engagements, but Grossman understands that history is ultimately experienced one person at a time. His achievement lies in making readers care about those individuals while never forgetting the larger forces that shape their lives.

Reading the novel today, however, is a different experience than it was ten years ago. The Russian invasion of Ukraine casts a long shadow over every page. Grossman himself was born in what is now Ukraine, and the Soviet Army he describes was an army composed of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, and dozens of other nationalities united against a common enemy. Throughout the novel, Russians and Ukrainians fight side by side against the Nazi invasion, sharing hardships, losses, and victories. Knowing that their descendants now face one another across battlefields is profoundly sad.

The novel also offers insight into the current war. Grossman’s depiction of Soviet resistance reminds readers of the extraordinary capacity for suffering displayed by both Russians and Ukrainians during the Second World War. The people he portrays endure losses that are almost unimaginable, yet continue fighting. Reading Stalingrad today makes it difficult to believe that either side in the current conflict will simply collapse from exhaustion or casualties. The historical memory of sacrifice runs too deep.

Yet Grossman is no simple patriot. Even within the constraints of Soviet censorship, he reveals the tensions and contradictions within Stalin’s state. The seeds of the more daring and devastating second novel Life and Fate are already present. The themes that would later define that masterpiece—freedom, tyranny, courage, and moral responsibility—can be seen emerging beneath the surface of Stalingrad.

As a historical novel, Stalingrad is magnificent. As a portrait of a society at war, it is unmatched. And as a reminder of both the resilience and tragedy of the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, it feels more relevant today than when Grossman first wrote it. Few novels better capture the human cost of war, and fewer still achieve it on such an epic scale.

Now I will reread Life and Fate.

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In 2019 I read Stalingrad and wrote about it here.