Timothy Joseph, College of the Holy Cross

In a week filled with news about President Donald Trump’s aggressive moves to take control of Greenland, the world got a window into his thinking about the concept of “peace.”

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump said in the message to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.

Trump has long coveted the Nobel Peace Prize. In his second term as president, he has styled himself as a peacemaker, as his message to Støre demonstrates. But as I have learned from my work as a scholar of Roman history and rhetoric, the word “peace” can mean something entirely different when used by those wielding power.

In the year 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder ‘control,’ and when they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace.’”

This line, said of the Romans by an enemy of Rome in Tacitus’ work “Agricola,” has had a long and varied afterlife among those commenting on imperialism.

Nearly 2,000 years after Tacitus’ time, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy used the phrase in a 1968 speech questioning the U.S. war in Vietnam; the Irish poet Seamus Heaney echoed it in a 1974 poem figuring his homeland’s centuries of desolation; more recently still, the HBO series “Succession” reworked the words into a critique of the show’s despotic central character.

The quotation has had staying power because it cuts to the core of how talk of peace can be used as a tool of war and power acquisition.

At the one-year mark of the second Trump administration, these words from two millennia ago speak as presciently as ever.

Time and again over the last year, Trump has branded acts of war with the language of peace. More broadly, his administration’s persistent styling of Trump as a “President of Peace” and his continuous claims of entitlement to the Nobel Peace Prize have moved in tandem with a growing agenda of military aggression, both foreign and domestic.

‘War is peace’

Tacitus, who lived from c. 55 to c. 120 CE, places his critique of Roman imperial rhetoric into the mouth of Calgacus, the possibly fictionalized chief of the Caledonians in northern Britain. The words, delivered in a speech before the Battle of Mons Graupius in 83 CE, anticipated what was to come: a crushing Roman victory and the devastation of the Caledonian people.

Calgacus’ aphorism gets at something fundamental about Roman imperial propaganda, which presented the cessation of war – on their terms – as “peace.” A physical representation of this is the Altar of Augustan Peace, from 9 BCE, which was built after the warlord Augustus’ victories in foreign and civil wars. A reconstruction of one of the monument’s friezes includes the personified goddess Roma sitting atop war spoils. Peace for Rome was tantamount to victory for Rome – or, as in this case, for one of Rome’s strongmen.

And while Tacitus, an accomplished Roman politician and provincial governor, was himself no opponent of Roman imperialism, it is significant that he crafts a speech for an enemy of Rome that gives the lie to the Roman rhetoric of peace. The non-Roman’s perspective on Romans’ “lying names” cuts through the posturing of the imperialist.

Calgacus’ critique thus puts into relief the jarring juxtapositions the world has seen and heard from Trump over the last year.

On Dec. 31, 2025, Trump declared that his New Year’s resolution for 2026 was “peace on Earth.” Three days later, he invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, a military action that left 100 dead and a humanitarian crisis looming. Apart from claiming control of some $2.5 billion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump has provided few details about how he will personally “run the country.”

A similarly striking disconnect between rhetoric and reality came earlier in 2025 with the U.S.’s June 21 bombing of Iran, which the White House X account celebrated with the declaration “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Some seven months later, as the Iranian regime violently suppresses broad protests, Trump is weighing additional acts of war, saying that “the military is looking at it and we’re looking at some strong options.”

In Gaza, Trump is chairing a “Board of Peace” to oversee the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and to implement a new government. The Israel/Hamas War is one of eight wars Trump claims credit for ending.

As with the seven other cases, the claim to have brought peace in Gaza lacks substantiation.

From the announcement of the ceasefire on Oct. 10, 2025, through Dec. 30, 2025, 414 Palestinians have been killed and 1,145 injured by Israeli attacks. That is, the war rages on.

Now Trump, apparently out of resentment at not being award the Nobel, declares that he will seize Greenland “one way or the other” and that Cuba must accept his terms on Venezuelan oil shipments “before it is too late.”

At home, Trump ramps up the presence of ICE, whose violent approach to enforcement has had deadly consequences for 32 people in custody and one woman protester.

All this as FIFA, the international governing body for soccer, awards Trump its first-ever Peace Prize; and as he stamps his name on – after defunding – the U.S Institute of Peace.

Spread of ‘peace’ rhetoric

Today’s dizzying clashes in word and deed are illuminated by Calgacus’ searing words, which show how easily the rhetoric of peace can be used to cover for or distract from acts of war.

At the same time, Tacitus points readers to the prevalence and thus the normalization and commonness of this rhetoric, which can become an inseparable corollary of a program of making war.

Indeed, Tacitus presents similar indictments of Roman imperial rhetoric twice elsewhere in his writing, again from the perspectives of those threatened by Rome.

For both the Batavians, of modern-day Netherlands, in the “Histories” and another group of Britons in the “Annals,” the great menace to their peoples is Roman “peace.”

Timothy Joseph, Professor of Classics and the Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, College of the Holy Cross

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Neville Morley, University of Exeter

In his speech to this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney mourned the demise of international cooperation by evoking an authority from ancient Greece.

“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.”

Journalists and academics from Denmark, Greece and the United States have quoted the same line from the ancient Greek historian when discussing Donald Trump’s demand for Greenland. It is cited as inspiration for his adviser Stephen Miller’s aggressive foreign policy approach, not least towards Venezuela.

In blogs and social media, the fate of Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have been interpreted through the same frame. It’s clearly difficult to contemplate today’s world and not react as W.H. Auden did to the collapse of the old order in 1939: “Exiled Thucydides knew.”

The paradox of the “strong do what they can” line is that it’s understood in radically different ways. On the one hand, it’s presented as a description of the true nature of the world (against naive liberals) and as a normative statement (the weak should submit).

On the other hand, it’s seen as an image of the dark authoritarian past we hoped was behind us, and as a condemnation of unfettered power. All these interpretations claim the authority of Thucydides.

That is a powerful imprimatur.

Thucydides’ insistence on the importance of seeking out the truth about the past, rather than accepting any old story, grounded his claim that such inquiry would help readers understand present and future events.

As a result, in the modern era he has been praised both as the forerunner of critical scientific historiography and as a pioneering political theorist. The absence of anything much resembling theoretical rules in his text has not stopped people from claiming to identify them.

The strong/weak quote is a key example. It comes from the Melian dialogue from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In 416BC, an Athenian force arrived at the neutral island of Melos and demanded its surrender. The Melian leaders asked to negotiate, and Thucydides presents a fictional reconstruction of the subsequent exchange.

The quote comes from the beginning, when the Athenians stipulated that they would not claim any right to seize Melos, other than the power to do so, and conversely would not listen to any arguments from principle. “Questions of justice apply only to those equal in power,” they stated bluntly. “Otherwise, such things as are possible, the superior exact and the weak give up.”

Within modern international relations theory, this is sometimes interpreted as the first statement of the realist school of thought.

Scholars like John Mearsheimer claim that Thucydides identified the basic principle of realist theory that, in an “anarchic” world, international law applies only if it’s in powerful states’ strategic interest, and otherwise might makes right. The fate of the Melians, utterly destroyed after they foolishly decided to resist, reinforces the lesson.

But these are the words of characters in Thucydides’ narrative, not of Thucydides himself. We cannot simply assume that Thucydides believed that “might makes right” is the true nature of the world, or that he intended his readers to draw that conclusion.

The Athenians themselves may not have believed it, since their goal was to intimidate the Melians into surrendering without a fight. More importantly, Thucydides and his readers knew all about the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily the following year, which showed the serious practical limits to the “want, take, have” mentality.

So, we shouldn’t take this as a realist theoretical proposition. But if Thucydides intended instead simply to depict imperialist arrogance, teach “pride comes before a fall”, or explore how Athenian attitudes led to catastrophic miscalculation, he could have composed a single speech.

His choice of dialogue shows that things are more complicated, and not just about Athens. He is equally interested in the psychology of the “weak”, the Melians’ combination of pleading, bargaining, wishful thinking and defiance, and their ultimate refusal to accept the Athenian argument.

This doesn’t mean that the Melian arguments are correct, even if we sympathise with them more. Their thinking can be equally problematic. Perhaps they have a point in suggesting that if they give in immediately, they lose all hope, “but if we resist you then there is still hope we may not be destroyed”.

Their belief that the gods will help them “because we are righteous men defending ourselves against aggression”, however, is naive at best. The willingness of the ruling clique to sacrifice the whole city to preserve their own position must be questioned.

The back and forth of dialogue highlights conflicting world views and values, and should prompt us to consider our own position. What is the place of justice in an anarchic world? Is it right to put sovereignty above people’s lives? How does it feel to be strong or weak?

It’s worthwhile engaging with the whole episode, not just isolated lines – or even trying to find your own way through the debate to a less bad outcome.

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, introducing his classic 1629 translation, noted that Thucydides never offered rules or lessons but was nevertheless “the most politic historiographer that ever writ”. Modern readers have too often taken isolated quotes out of context, assumed that they represent the author’s own views and claimed them as timeless laws. Hobbes saw Thucydides as presenting complex situations that we need to puzzle out.

It’s remarkable that an author famed for his depth and complexity gets reduced to soundbites. But the contradictions in how those soundbites are interpreted – the way that Thucydides presents us with a powerful and controversial idea but doesn’t tell us what to think about it – should send us back to the original.

Neville Morley, Professor in Classics, Ancient History, Religion, and Theology, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.