The American Conservative’s new managing editor, Jude Russo, has a fun column about a worrisome topic on the site today. My summary doesn’t do justice to the brilliance of this concise piece, but Russo begins with a hypothetical scenario in which a powerful landed power seeks to conquer an island power capable of punching far beyond its weight if seen as just a blotch of green on a map. It sounds like the current situation between mainland China and the island of Taiwan. But as the hypothetical continues, it becomes clear that Jude’s not talking about China and Taiwan. Rather, he’s giving his own summary of Athen’s campaign against the island of Sicily in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

“Yet the story of the Sicilian Expedition shares enough fundamentals with the current Taiwan situation to provide useful points of caution both to China and to the U.S.,” Russo writes. “It is simply difficult to project force onto a rugged island inhabited by the rich, the well-armed, and the hostile. Efforts to do so will certainly meet with difficulty, sometimes with catastrophe.”

Indeed, and such difficulties I’ve discussed in the pages of TAC before, but they bear repeating for the hawks scattered throughout the government and their corporate backers who overlook the imperial city from their highrises across the Potomac in Arlington.