The headlines from Thucydides were often taken to be the descriptions of the irresistibility of power and the imperviousness of the strong to the complaints of the weak or considerations of morality. On this basis he has been cast as one of the founders of realism, a temperament to which strategic theorists have been presumed to be susceptible because of their relentless focus on power and their presumption that self-interest best explains behavior. According to the more doctrinaire realism, the lack of a supreme authority governing all international affairs has always rendered states
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