The history of the ancient world is, in no small measure, a chronicle of men who confused the beginning of war with the achievement of policy. Thucydides opens his account of the Peloponnesian War not with battles but with arguments — the arguments made by those who convinced Athens that it could fight Sparta, Corinth, and the Aegean world simultaneously without exhausting the treasury or the will of its citizens. Athens had the power. What it lacked was the wisdom to know when power's purpose is deterrence rather than deployment.
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