Thucydides on War and Foreign Policy in 2011

Lessons and thoughts from ancient Greece by foreign policy professor Walter Russell Mead.  Here's the beginning of it:

If a specter haunts the chancellories of America, it isn’t communism and it isn’t Karl Marx.  It’s Thucydides, the chronicler of the 30 year Peloponnesian War between ancient Sparta and Athens that led to the comprehensive defeat of the world’s first great democratic power.  The assumptions most Americans bring to the study of foreign policy — that there are win-win solutions for most problems, that democracy makes for a more peaceful world, that international law can prevail and that power need not be the final arbiter in human affairs — strike Thucydides as pious, nonsensical claptrap. 

Unfortunately, he was a very smart man, and much of what he wrote makes sense.