Ed

And I don't even know if I'm saying that word correctly, by the way, hegemonic power in the Mediterranean.

And it's like they literally say, we're the strongest.

And, you know, this is where the famous phrase, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, comes from.

That's attributed by Thucydides to the Athenians.

And the whole gag of that book, The Peloponnesian War, is you start thinking that way and you get in trouble.

Yes.

Right?

Eventually you overstep.

And I think, you know, again, as a non-politics expert, I think that makes sense.

You know, you do something, it works.

You try the next thing, you try the next thing.

The only thing that stops you

is disaster.

Yeah, and we can say, and you can look at American history, the kind of MAGA realists will say,

It's always been about force.

We were just hypocrites before, and now we're just being less hypocritical.

And, you know, there's a perfectly plausible reading of history that that's true.

You know, it's always been about a contest of force.

You know, we just know it now.

I'm not endorsing that.