Ishaan Tharoor's Washington Post column on Sparta and Athens

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor's December 30, 2025, column from the newspaper's Today's WorldView newsletter discusses how right-wing politicians in the United States and globally are embracing an ethos based on the militaristic myth of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, and contrasts that myth with ancient Sparta's flawed reality of militarism, internal oppression, and isolationism. He also contrasts ancient Sparta's ethos with that of its rival, ancient Athens, which instead engaged in what could be considered an early equivalent of internationalism, including exploration, the discovery of new ideas, and international trade. As Tharoor puts it, "communalism and [a] closed economic order [are] more 'Spartan' in nature...maritime dominance and capitalist zeal, more 'Athenian.'"

Our podcast's six-part "America First" series explored American isolationism between the 1880s and 1945. Although Tharoor does not discuss the  "America First" movement per se, the analogies to ancient Sparta Tharoor describes are striking, especially with regard to the material we cover in Episode 105 and Episode 106. If you have a Washington Post subscription, you can read Tharoor's column here.

Tharoor includes a quote from Harvard political scientist Graham Allison which easily could be part of a mission statement for The United States of Amnesia podcast: "When people cherry-pick one or two features of an analogy, that will frequently tell you more about the person and their views than it will about the illumination of the world.”