The middle power Melian Dialogue
The traditional teaching of the Melian Dialogue doesn’t quite capture reality for those in middle power states—it distorts it.
The Melian Dialogue is routinely taught in international relations (IR) classes as a morality play about power and justice. Small states are told to admire the doomed courage of Melos while recoiling at the cold brutality of Athens. IR Professors will often add the line that captures the lesson, and for them, the crux of realist thought: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Yet, for students in middle power countries, that traditional teaching of the Melian Dialogue doesn’t quite capture reality. In fact, it pretty much distorts it.
On the one hand, they are taught to think like Athens. They learn the language of power maximization, coercion, deterrence, credibility, escalation dominance, and systemic hierarchy. IR theory, particularly in its realist forms, trains students to view the world from the vantage point of great powers managing an anarchic system.
But on the other hand, their own states are not Athens. They are Melos.
This creates an intellectual dislocation at the heart of IR education in many middle power states. Students are encouraged to internalize the worldview of hegemonic actors while living within states that possess neither the military reach, economic insulation, nor strategic autonomy necessary to behave like them.
That traditional teaching encourages two equally dangerous instincts.
The first is romanticism: the belief that moral courage, declaratory principles, or ideological alignment can compensate for structural weakness.
The second is mimicry: the tendency for middle powers to imitate the strategic language and assumptions of hegemons, even when their own interests may require ambiguity, flexibility, or adaptation instead.
What IR students in middle power states are rarely taught is that their strategic problem is fundamentally different from that of great powers. Great powers ask: “How do we shape the system?” but middle powers have to ask: “How do we survive the system (or survive change in the system) without being crushed by it?”
That requires a very different intellectual framework. It requires studying adaptation rather than dominance, flexibility rather than primacy, endurance rather than expansion, and strategic ambiguity rather than ideological absolutism.
In that sense, the traditional reading of the Melian Dialogue doesn’t train middle power elites. It misleads them into accepting the wrong role. It teaches them how empires think, but not necessarily how smaller states survive empires.
As a result, many middle power elites end up rhetorically performing great power politics without possessing great power capabilities. They speak in the language of universal values, regional order, deterrence credibility, and strategic resolve (listen to any Australian politician for examples), often without confronting the brutal structural question the Melian Dialogue actually raises for weaker states: how does one survive proximity to and the pressure from, an overwhelming power?
The Melians argued like a state that believed principle could offset power. They appealed to justice, neutrality, morality, and hope. They believed their refusal to submit possessed intrinsic strategic value. They hoped others would rescue them. They assumed that because their position was morally defensible, it was therefore strategically sustainable.
They were annihilated! If it was today, it may have been three generations of sanctions, covert operations, occasional assassinations, and then school bombings and war—the end result is the same.
From the perspective of an adaptive middle power, the Melian position as taught in IR classrooms appears less noble than catastrophically rigid.
Small and middle powers do not survive by confusing sovereignty with absolute autonomy. Nor do they survive by emotionally resisting geopolitical gravity. They survive by adapting to structures larger than themselves while preserving enough flexibility to maneuver when those structures eventually change.
Athens was not negotiating with Melos in 416 BCE. It was clarifying hierarchy. The issue was not morality. The issue was whether Melos understood the distribution of power well enough to survive within it!
A structural realist middle power would have recognized this immediately!
It would not have interpreted the situation as a binary choice between glorious resistance and humiliating surrender. Instead, it would have pursued strategic accommodation without psychological submission. It would have accepted Athenian predominance while quietly preserving internal autonomy, elite continuity, economic functionality, and long-term flexibility.
Such a state would have offered symbolic compliance where necessary, practical cooperation where useful, and ideological silence where prudent. It would not have wasted energy proclaiming abstract principles to an empire that had already demonstrated indifference to them.
Of course, presenting such an approach to a domestic audience is extraordinarily difficult, particularly in political systems where foreign interests, ideological networks, media ecosystems, academic institutions, and security establishments shape the acceptable boundaries of political discourse.
Strategic adaptation is easily caricatured as appeasement, betrayal, weakness, or capitulation. Domestic audiences are often conditioned to interpret geopolitical realities through moral narratives carefully reinforced over decades by alliance structures, funding relationships, educational exchanges, think tanks, media commentary, and political patronage networks. Under such conditions, even discussing acquiescence can become politically dangerous. Leaders may therefore continue publicly performing ideological loyalty long after private elites recognize structural realities have shifted.
Most importantly, the adaptive middle power would have recognized something the Melians failed to grasp: hegemonic systems are temporary.
Athens appeared invincible at the moment of the dialogue. Yet within decades it was exhausted, strategically overextended, and ultimately defeated. History is littered with hegemonic powers that mistook temporary predominance for permanence.
The objective of the adaptive middle power is therefore not moral victory. It is strategic continuity.
It is strange that in South Korea’s own IR classrooms, the Melian Dialogue is often taught as a morality play about power and justice. Top line professors return from schooling at the best U.S. institutions with a firm understanding of the world - from the U.S. perspective.
It is strange because South Korea’s own history is a living refutation to traditional interpretations of the Melian Dialogue. Korea survived and sustained independence for centuries next to China not through romanticism and mimicry of great powers, but by strategic adaptation. This is the lesson that should be taught in South Korean IR schools!
The world is entering another era in which hegemonic structures are becoming unstable. Great powers are demanding alignment, punishing ambiguity, and narrowing strategic space for smaller states. Under such conditions, the Melian instinct remains deeply seductive. Defiance is emotionally satisfying. It flatters national identity. It creates the illusion of agency.
It is also increasingly tempting as the capacity of middle powers relative to great powers increases. Precision strike systems, drones, cyber capabilities, and advanced industrial bases have narrowed aspects of the gap once separating regional states from global powers. Many middle powers now possess enough capability to believe they can openly resist larger powers. Yet greater capacity does not eliminate structural reality. Middle powers may be stronger than before, but they still operate within systems shaped by others.
Adaptive middle powers understand something more important than emotional satisfaction: survival creates future opportunities. Destruction postpones them.
The weak who survive long enough often outlast the strong.
Athens is gone. So too are countless empires that once demanded obedience as if history itself had ended in their favor. The states that endured were not necessarily the bravest or the purest. Often they were the most adaptive.
That may not make for inspiring mythology. But it is usually how states remain alive long enough to write history instead of merely dying inside it.
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