The Lessons of Tragedy

Statecraft and World Order

De: Hal Brands, Charles Edel

Narrado por: Marc Cashman

An eloquent call to draw on the lessons of the past to address current threats to international order

The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage--to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivaled global leadership, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. They have forgotten that the descent into violence and war has been all too common throughout human history. This amnesia has become most pronounced just as Americans and the global order they created are coming under graver threat than at any time in decades.

In a forceful argument that brims with historical sensibility and policy insights, two distinguished historians argue that a tragic sensibility is necessary if America and its allies are to address the dangers that menace the international order today. Tragedy may be commonplace, Brands and Edel argue, but it is not inevitable--so long as we regain an appreciation of the world's tragic nature before it is too late.


Cover image obtained from Ancient Sculpture Gallery (www.ancientsculpturegallery.com)

When Tragedy Becomes Alibi: The Ideology Behind The Lessons of Tragedy

Hal Brands and Charles Edel’s The Lessons of Tragedy presents itself as a sober, historically grounded meditation on power, strategy, and the responsibilities of American leadership in a dangerous world. In reality, it is a deeply ideological work—one that dresses a familiar case for U.S. global hegemony in the language of classical tragedy, while emptying both history and tragedy of their actual meaning.

The book opens with an extended discussion of Greek tragedy and the Peloponnesian War, clearly intended to provide intellectual ballast for the authors’ thesis. One might reasonably expect that a serious engagement with Thucydides would confront the central lesson of the Athenian catastrophe: that imperial overreach, coercion of allies, relentless military expansion, and moral arrogance ultimately destroyed Athens. The Athenians did not fall because they were insufficiently assertive; they fell because they mistook dominance for stability and power for legitimacy.

Yet Brands and Edel extract precisely the opposite lesson. In their telling, Athens seems to fail not because it did too much, but because it did not do enough—or did not do it ruthlessly or consistently enough. This inversion sets the tone for the rest of the book. Tragedy, for them, does not warn against hubris; it warns against restraint.

From this foundation, the authors proceed to their core argument: the United States must continue to lead—and aggressively defend—a “U.S.-led global order.” This phrase recurs throughout the book, functioning as a rhetorical substitute for what is plainly meant: American global hegemony. The substitution is not accidental. “Hegemony” carries historical and moral baggage; “global order” sounds benevolent, neutral, even altruistic.

Similarly, the authors divide the world into “liberal democracies” and “authoritarian states,” without ever seriously defining what they mean by “liberal.” This omission is striking, given how contested the term is historically. Liberalism has been invoked to justify revolutions, empires, wars, and mass violence—from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution, from Wilsonian interventionism in World War I to Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam. To simply equate “liberal democracy” with moral legitimacy, and opposition to U.S. power with authoritarianism, is not analysis; it is name-calling dressed up as theory.

The book’s treatment of the post–World War II order is especially revealing. Brands and Edel repeatedly imply—sometimes explicitly, sometimes by omission—that the United States “won” World War II and thereby earned the right to shape the global system that followed. What is left largely unspoken is the decisive role played by the Soviet Union, which absorbed the overwhelming share of the war’s human and material destruction, losing roughly 27 million people. It was this sacrifice that crushed Nazi Germany and made possible the postwar balance of power from which the United States emerged relatively unscathed and economically dominant.

Equally absent is a serious engagement with Franklin Roosevelt’s original vision for the postwar world. Roosevelt did not imagine a unipolar, U.S.-dominated order. His conception—reflected at Yalta and in the founding of the United Nations—was explicitly multipolar: regional great powers (the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, Europe) cooperating to prevent another catastrophic war. The aggressive push toward American-led global dominance came later, under Truman, and was driven less by liberal idealists than by hardline conservatives and anti-communist hawks.

Against this historical backdrop, The Lessons of Tragedy reads less like a reflection on history and more like a brief for contemporary policy. The failures of recent decades—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, even the long-term consequences of the Gulf War—are largely waved away or treated as unfortunate but irrelevant detours. There is little reckoning with the possibility that these disasters are not anomalies, but predictable outcomes of the very strategy the authors advocate.

The book’s conclusion is blunt, if not entirely explicit: Americans must “buckle up.” They must accept higher military spending, greater pressure on allies to conform to U.S. priorities, and an ongoing willingness to confront—politically, economically, and militarily—China and Russia in order to preserve American primacy. This is presented not as a choice, but as a tragic necessity, as though history itself has issued an ultimatum.

But tragedy, properly understood, does not absolve its protagonists of responsibility. It exposes the consequences of their choices. By emptying tragedy of its moral content, Brands and Edel turn it into a rhetorical shield—one that protects power from accountability rather than subjecting it to scrutiny.

In the end, The Lessons of Tragedy is not a work of tragic wisdom. It is a familiar argument for perpetual dominance, framed in classical language to give it the appearance of inevitability. What it ultimately teaches is not how great powers fall, but how unwilling some thinkers are to imagine a world in which American hegemony is neither permanent nor morally self-justifying.

The authors should read Oedipus Rex and Aristotle

The authors remind us that the world is a dangerous place. So far, so good. But I would not recommend listening to this book. The authors' grasp of Greek tragedy is tenuous and tendentious. I was surprised that a professor of international relations or the like at a well-regarded university would write a book about global strategy as a melodrama. It also seemed very backward-looking, at a time of great technological, economic, and environmental change.