US President Donald Trump has invited Pope Leo XIV to join his Board of Peace for Gaza. “We are considering what to do,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s top diplomat, told the media. “I believe it will be something that requires a bit of time for consideration before giving a response.”
Here are a few things the Vatican ought to consider.
In 416 BC, the city-state of Athens, the most powerful polity in Greece, was enraged at the intransigence of the tiny island of Melos. Athens was in the middle of a desperate struggle with Sparta. At stake was supremacy of the Greek world. Melos declared that it was going to be neutral.
No way José, said the Athenians. Join us or be annihilated. The Melians refused. The Athenians were as good as their word. They annihilated them, slaughtering the men and selling the women and children into slavery.
Their negotiations have gone down in history as the “Melian dialogue”. Realistic and merciless, the Athenian wolves told the Melian mice, as recorded by the Greek historian Thucydides: “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
This is precisely the message that US President Donald Trump has been hurling at weaklings across the globe from Venezuela, to Iran, to Gaza, to Cuba, to Norway, to Denmark, and to France.
His words at Davos about Denmark’s reluctance to hand Greenland over to the US shocked his listeners: “They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.”
Channelling the sinister Athenian bullies, Trump also demanded a better deal on prescription drugs from French President Macron: “Here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it fast. And if you don’t, I’m putting a 25 per cent tariff on everything that you sell into the United States. And a 100 per cent tariff on your wines and champagnes.”
In his own speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney referred to the Melian dialogue. The liberal world order has ended, he said bitterly. The world is witnessing “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints”.
On that point Carney might be wrong. Everybody has limits. President Trump described what his are in a wide-ranging interview with four New York Times journalists in the Oval Office in January.
“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he said. “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Can the Vatican really work with someone who reasons like this? Someone who believes that “might is right” is the rule of international relations?
Only a few days ago, Pope Leo gave a brilliant speech to diplomats at the Vatican. In a none-too-subtle reference to Trump’s foreign policy, he said: “In our time, the weakness of multilateralism is a particular cause for concern at the international level. A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.”
As he often does, the Pope quoted his beloved St Augustine, a man who lived through the chaotic collapse of the Roman Empire. With exquisite irony, Augustine pointed out that everyone wants peace, even warmongers: “They do not, therefore, wish to have no peace, but only the peace that they desire.”
And Leo glosses these words: “It was precisely this attitude that led humanity into the tragedy of the Second World War.”
The metaphor that comes to my mind is tasteless, but I’ll use it. Stick to your guns, Holy Father. Do not take the side of the Athenians.
In any case, the fee for joining the Board of Peace is US$1 billion (A$1.5 billion). Should Peter’s Pence be splurged to tickle the vanity of an American Ozymandias?
