A few days ago, a friend with a jaundiced view of politics, asked me: “What difference does it make, no matter who is elected President? What can he do that would be so bad.” “A fair question.” I responded. I confine myself to commenting only on why I believe Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy. Based on what he has said he will do if he wins, what he did during his previous tenure, and how foreign countries are reacting to him, I fear that Trump will undo our system of alliances.

The power of the United States, a power respected and feared across the globe, rests on the fact that unlike our adversaries we have many, many willing allies. Let me re-emphasize the word ‘willing’. Our principal adversaries have few allies and those few are generally coerced or puppet allies.

I reminded my friend of what happened to Athens, in the 5^th century BC. Athens dominated the ancient world because it had a powerful navy and a long roster of allies who shared its commitment to what could be termed the ‘liberal world order’ of the time. Through a series of missteps driven by a toxic combination of hubris and greed, Athens alienated those allies and drove them into the arms of its primary adversary, Sparta. Sparta, now having gained maritime allies, blockaded Piraeus and starved Athens into surrender.

Recently, Trump, at a campaign rally, claimed he told the ‘president of a big country’ who asked according to Trump: “Well sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia – will you protect us?”

Trump replied, “I said: ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ He said: ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay,” Trump said.

Although I doubt Trump actually had the conversation, it was still an articulation of policy by the person who has a good chance being our next President. We have a legal obligation under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty to come to the defense of any other signatory country. Once President Trump (Version 2.0) calls the obligations of Article 5 into question, the bedrock of the NATO treaty will begin to crumble. NATO, in turn, is the bedrock of the world economic order that has made so many countries, first and foremost the United States, wealthy beyond our wildest expectations in 1945.

We should note that Article 5 has been invoked only once since the establishment of NATO in 1949; all our European allies, unasked and unprompted, invoked NATO’s Article 5 on September 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in defense of the United States. NATO immediately created its first anti-terror operation and contributed troops and treasure in support of the U.S. operations that grew out of 9/11 until our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Adding to European worries, Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in ‘one day’ without adding specifics. He has been reliably reported as saying that he would end the war by pressuring Ukraine into surrendering the Ukrainian territories coveted by Putin. Trump’s PR staff denied the report, but his friend and admirer, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, undermined the denials saying that Trump had revealed the plan to him as well.

On the economic front, Trump has promised to start a trade war with the entire world by imposing a ten percent tariff on all imports, including goods produced by our allies. Leaving aside the economic consequences of such a step, our allies are tied to us by being part and parcel of the economic world order that created and sustained our great national wealth since the end of World War II. Tariffs of such magnitude would effectively dissolve that order.

Trump has clearly not read Thucydides’ landmark work, ‘The Peloponnesian Wars’, the story of the war between Athens and Sparta, the first and perhaps the best book ever written on politico-military affairs. Athens led the Hellenic World in defeating the Persian Empire, freed Greek cities in Asia Minor from the Persian yoke, and ushered in the Golden Age of Greece. Athens’ power and successes depended on the Delian League, an alliance of like-minded mostly maritime democratic city-states who were ‘willing’ allies. I emphasize the word willing. Athens had led an alliance that defeated the Persian Empire and ushered in a period of unprecedented wealth, not unlike what transpired in the years since World War II. An upstart monarchy with a powerful army, Sparta, challenged Athens’ hegemony but given Athens’ powerful fleet and its allies it could not prevail. Unfortunately, Athens grew greedy and arrogant, emptied the Treasury at Delos which had sustained the Delian League, and began to treat its allies as subject entities. Sparta recruited these allies and now with an allied fleet at its disposal, blockaded and starved Athens into surrender.

As Mark Twain noted “history does not always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The foreign policy Donald Trump has said he will introduce if elected sounds like the first stanza of the rhyme. The founding myth that America could stand alone and ‘avoid foreign entanglements’ was just that: a myth. Our first foreign war, with the Barbary Pirates, was fought in support of our international trade. I invite readers to find a copy of the Peloponnesian Wars; it’s a fascinating read. Its most interesting character is Alcibiades, a rabble-rouser of the first order, totally divorced from morality or love of country who conned the Athenians into one disastrous venture after another, and then ask if history has rhymed again.