• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

A Melian Peace "The Triumph of the Weak"

The analogy to Vietnam exposes the fatal flaw in the simplistic "strong always win" doctrine by providing a historical case study where perceived strength, measured in sheer military and economic power, failed catastrophically against a "weaker" opponent. The premise that "Russia is stronger than Ukraine and so will be the inevitable victor" is based on a narrow, almost 19th-century calculus of power. It counts tanks, missiles, population, and landmass. It is the logic of the Melian Dialogue, which, we must remember, ended with the physical destruction of Melos. However, this logic ignores the critical, intangible elements that determine the outcome of modern conflicts:

• Political Will: Strength is not just a material resource; it is a psychological and political one. Ukraine has demonstrated a national will to exist that has proven, thus far, stronger than Russia's will to conquer. A nation fighting for its survival, mobilized by a clear cause, can generate a resilience that an army of conquest, plagued by ambiguous motives and internal dissent, cannot match.
• Morale and Motivation: The Ukrainian volunteer soldier defends her home. The initial Russian conscript was often unsure why he was there. This asymmetry in motivation is a critical multiplier of combat effectiveness that raw power indices fail to capture.
• The Nature of Modern Warfare: In the age of the smartphone and the Javelin, a decentralized, agile, and highly motivated force, equipped with advanced technology from sympathetic allies, can negate the advantages of a centralized, lumbering military bureaucracy. This is the lesson of insurgencies from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

The Vietnam precedent is "The Triumph of the Weak". By any traditional metric of "strength," the United States was overwhelmingly superior to North Vietnam. The United States possessed the world's largest economy, most advanced military technology, and a global logistical network. North Vietnam was a predominantly agrarian, developing nation. If the "strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must," the war should have been a swift American victory. Instead, it was a humiliating American defeat.

• The Asymmetry of Will: For the U.S., Vietnam was a theater in the Cold War, a "domino" to be stabilized. For Hanoi, it was a existential struggle for national unification and independence, the culmination of a century of anti-colonial resistance. Their will to endure suffering and sacrifice was absolute.
• The Political Dimension: The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong understood that their battlefield was not only in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but also in the living rooms of America. They waged a war of attrition designed not to defeat the U.S. military in a conventional sense, but to break American political will. They understood that in a democracy, public support is a strategic center of gravity. They succeeded.

The lesson is clear: Inevitability is a myth. What appears to be a foregone conclusion based on material strength can be overturned by resilience, strategy, and a superior will. To suggest that Ukraine must capitulate because Russia is "stronger" is to ignore the very lesson of Vietnam: that the calculus of war is far more complex. The call for Ukraine to sue for peace to "avoid further needless suffering" is a humanitarian argument that, in this context, becomes a tool of coercion. This modern version of the Athenians telling the Melians that resistance is futile and will only lead to their destruction has two fatal flaws:

1. It Legitimizes Aggression: It places the moral onus for stopping the violence on the victim of aggression, rather than the aggressor. The logical conclusion is that any powerful state can use violence to seize territory, and the international community's response should be to pressure the weaker state to surrender to avoid a bloodier fight. This creates a perverse incentive for war and makes the world infinitely more dangerous.
2. It Assumes a "Peace" is Inherently Desirable: A peace dictated by Moscow would not be a peace; it would be a punitive diktat and a temporary ceasefire. It would involve the cession of sovereign Ukrainian territory, the subjugation of millions of people, and the likely dismantling of the Ukrainian state. The "suffering" of war would be replaced by the suffering of occupation, oppression, and national dismemberment. The bloodshed would not have been "avoided," only deferred and transformed.

The worldview that reduces international relations to a simple binary of "strong" and "weak," and assumes the victory of the former is inevitable, is not just amoral — it is historically illiterate. The Vietnam War stands as a monumental testament to its error. To apply this flawed logic to Ukraine is to make a critical miscalculation. It mistakes Russia's initial advantages for inevitable victory, just as the U.S. did in Vietnam. It underestimates the power of national identity and the will to resist. And it advocates for a "peace" that would not end conflict, but would reward aggression, shatter the international order, and set a precedent that would guarantee more war in the future. The true lesson of Vietnam is not that the weak should surrender, but that the strong are not always what they seem, and that the will of a people defending their homeland is a force that can defy the most grim of material predictions.

Peace by Diktat

The Trump administration's 28-point peace plan represents a dramatic intervention in the Russia-Ukraine conflict that fundamentally reshapes the strategic landscape of Eastern Europe. While the proposal offers a pathway to ending immediate hostilities and provides substantial reconstruction resources, it does so by essentially validating Russian territorial conquest and imposing severe constraints on Ukrainian sovereignty. The framework's reception illustrates the vast gulf between American pragmatism, Russian ambitions, and Ukrainian principles, suggesting that genuine peace remains distant despite diplomatic efforts.

The plan's ultimate failure or success will depend on whether Ukrainian society can be pressured or persuaded to accept terms they currently view as capitulation, whether Russia can be trusted to honor agreements limiting future aggression, and whether the United States can maintain credible security guarantees over the long term. The answers to these questions will determine not only Ukraine's fate but also the future of the international order's fundamental principles regarding territorial integrity and the inadmissibility of conquest. The 28-point framework, whatever its immediate diplomatic prospects, has already succeeded in crystallizing the stark choices facing all parties and the profound compromises required for peace in a conflict that has challenged the post-Cold War European security architecture.

The chasm between Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Trump’s implicit "Twenty-Eight Points" represents a fundamental schism in American thought about its role in the world. Wilson, for all his failings and the ultimate collapse of his vision, pointed toward a future where power would be tamed by law and community. He sought to build a system that would protect the weak from the arbitrary will of the strong, a system where a "peace without victors" could ensure that no nation would be so humiliated as to seek revenge.

The Trump approach, by contrast, is a conscious reversion to a pre-Wilsonian, Thucydidean reality. It is a peace not of reconciliation and rules, but of dominance and diktat. It is a "Melian peace," where stability is maintained not by consent and shared principles, but by the constant, grim demonstration that the strong will do what they can, and the weak, in the face of overwhelming power, will have no choice but to do what they must. Where Wilson sought to construct a republic of nations, the Trump doctrine accepts, and indeed champions, the law of the jungle. The tragedy is not that this logic is new, but that it is ancient—and its re-emergence signals the unraveling of a century-long, albeit imperfect, project to create something better.

To characterize Trump's "28 Points" as a "peace of the vanquished" and a "diktat imposed on the helpless losing side" reveals the profound irony and tragedy of this posture. While Wilson sought to avoid creating a vanquished party, the Trumpian framework effectively turns the entire world into a potential Melos, where even formal allies are treated not as partners, but as defeated rivals who must accept the terms of the strong.

The Anatomy of a Diktat

A diktat peace, like the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany, is characterized by several features that are absent from a negotiated settlement:

• Unilateral Formulation: The terms are set by one side, with little to no genuine input from the other. In the Trumpian worldview, this manifests in policies crafted in isolation—withdrawing from treaties, imposing tariffs, making demands—and then presented as non-negotiable ultimatums. The "deal" is not a mutually agreed-upon contract but a set of conditions to which the other party must adhere.
• The Illusion of Negotiation: Much like the Athenians who offered the Melians a choice between submission or destruction, the process involves a brutal form of "negotiation" where the weaker party's only agency is to choose which form of loss it will accept. The "art of the deal" in this context is not compromise, but the art of coercion—identifying leverage and applying maximum pressure to force capitulation.
• Absence of Mutual Benefit: A "peace without victors" seeks to create a stable system that benefits all, believing that the security of one is intertwined with the security of all. A diktat seeks to extract maximum benefit for the victor, with no regard for the stability or well-being of the vanquished. The focus is on winning, often defined in narrow, transactional terms (trade deficits, monetary contributions), rather than building a sustainable order.

In Trump's Melian peace, the category of "the vanquished" is fluid and expansive. It is not limited to a single nation defeated in a hot war.

• Traditional Allies: NATO partners and other long-standing allies were frequently framed as adversaries in an economic war. They were portrayed as "freeloaders" who had exploited American generosity. The demand was for them to pay up or face the consequences—a classic ultimatum that cast them in the role of delinquent vassals, not sovereign partners. The desired outcome was their submission to American demands for increased financial contributions and policy alignment.
• Economic Competitors: Nations like China were treated not as complex strategic competitors requiring a blend of deterrence and diplomacy, but as entities that had "cheated" and needed to be brought to heel. The trade war was a campaign of coercion, an attempt to impose a diktat that would force structural changes in the Chinese economy on American terms.
• The International System Itself: The most profound "vanquished" entity in this framework is the post-WWII, Wilsonian-inspired liberal international order itself. Institutions like the WTO, the UN, and multilateral climate agreements were treated as hostile structures designed to constrain American power. Withdrawing from or undermining them was the act of a victor dismantling the system of a defeated rival, to be replaced by a new order based on bilateral power dynamics.