The physicist Richard Feynman asked:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?

His answer: “All things are made of atoms.”

What sentence about international politics packs the most punch? My choice would also look back to the Greeks: “Remember the Melians.” Feynman had to explain what he meant, so let me explain a little about the Melians.

In the Peloponnesian war, almost 2,500 years ago, Athens was a sea power, and Sparta was a land power. It would have been sensible for Melos, an island, to ally itself with Athens against Sparta. But Melos refused and instead stayed neutral. Athens invaded the island, and Thucydides recounts a famous parley, “the Melian conference,” between the two sides. The Athenians gave the Melians an ultimatum: surrender, or else. They pointed out that they had the overwhelming advantage and that their surrender terms were reasonable. The Melians appealed to the Athenians’ sense of justice and expressed an unrealistic hope that the Spartans, Athens’ enemies, would come to their aid. The Athenians told the Melians they were being foolish: “The strong do what they can,” they said, “and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians persisted in their wishful thinking. Athens destroyed the city, killed the men, and sold the women and children into slavery.

This summary of the dialogue comes from my 2016 post, Remember the Melians. I have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. Indeed, I’ve been thinking about it for decades, really since I took a course in international relations from Richard Falk—yes, that Richard Falk—at the same time as I was reading Thucydides and another great writer who translated Thucydides into English and who was obviously influenced by him, Thomas Hobbes. You may say that forming my opinions by weighing the foolish utopianism Professor Falk was serving up in his lectures against what I was reading elsewhere was not really fair, and I’m sure there were more thoughtful utopians or idealists out there who could have sent my views in a different direction. But in those formative years, I had the experiences I had, and so I’ve always found myself persuaded by the idea that realism in international politics is a precondition for having a just society. It’s one thing to have all the right ideas about justice. Maybe the Melians did. It’s another thing to have the power to put them into practice, which means the power to govern yourself, which means the power to keep others from governing you or killing you.

Maybe you think this sounds ridiculous. But almost every living American and, for families who immigrated long ago, his or her ancestors for some number of generations, have lived in a state that has been strong enough that we have been able mostly to rule ourselves in peace in a dangerous world. We will miss that when it is gone. Remember the Melians.

Why am I writing about this? Readers who have been patient and generous enough to read my posts on some of the legal commentary on the war in Gaza and now in Lebanon know that I’ve been critical of the approach many experts in international law have taken to the war. I’m not in a position to dispute their expertise in what the law is. But I am baffled by their overall approach to the war. The best example from the last week or so is the discussion about Security Council Resolution 1701.

Hezbollah started a war in 2006 by launching rockets at Israel and capturing several Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. After Israel counterattacked, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1701. It called for an immediate halt to hostilities. It called for both Israel and Hezbollah to withdraw all troops from the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river. It called for Hezbollah to be disarmed. And it called for the Lebanese army, with the help of a UN force, UNIFIL, to keep that area free of “any armed personnel, assets and weapons” other than UN and Lebanese government forces. UNIFIL was authorized to “take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind.”

Israel did withdraw from Lebanon, but Hezbollah never disarmed or left southern Lebanon. Instead, Hezbollah armed itself to the teeth and dug tunnels. Neither the Lebanese government nor UNIFIL did much about it, for nearly two decades. Lebanon, incidentally, has more or less suffered the political fate of the Melians. Its “government” is weak and beholden to Hezbollah, a supposedly non-state group.

On October 8, 2023, Hezbollah began firing shells and rockets at Israel. It’s fired thousands since. Its indiscriminate attacks have forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their towns in the north of the country.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemns Israel for violating Resolution 1701, even though Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2006 and even though none of the other parties did anything to prevent Hezbollah from doing exactly what it did when it started the 2006 war, only this time much more heavily armed and posing much more of an existential threat to Israel. But what is OHCHR’s answer to the existential threat Hezbollah poses to Israel, and more specifically, to its illegal and indiscriminate rocket attacks? The same absurd and immoral utopianism that led the Melians to their downfall. The Lebanese government, the same weak and ineffective government that failed to push Hezbollah back from the border or to disarm it for almost twenty years, should “investigate, arrest, and prosecute or extradite” the Hezbollah fighters responsible. Investigate, arrest, and prosecute? Are these people living in the same world that the rest of us are living in?

This is not a post about ill treatment of Israel or double standards when it comes to the Jewish state. It’s a post about international lawyers whose view of the world is as foolish as the Melians’. I worry that a big part of our intelligentsia can no longer comprehend that not every problem in international relations is a legal problem, that the existence of some nations and states is seriously threatened by armed and motivated forces who seek to destroy them, and that states under such threats that do not have the means to resist attackers with force will meet the fate of the Melians. They condemn the Israelis for not agreeing to cease existing. That is what I mean when I say that I don’t know if thoroughgoing international legal critics of Israel are right or wrong about the law, but that if they’re right, there is something dramatically wrong and immoral with the law.

Image credit: Greg Robbins (CC BY-NC-SA) (ruins); Iran Review (CC BY) (Richard Falk photo); National Portrait Gallery (Public Domain) (Thomas Hobbes portrait).