What Shakespeare and Ancient Greece teach us about ending the Ukraine War

The Hill

11-07-2025

'War,' as Thucydides once wrote, 'is a violent teacher.' But it teaches in strange and terrible ways. It exposes illusions, punishes pride and delivers suffering without justice. This the Greeks knew. This Shakespeare dramatized. And this we are once again in danger of forgetting.
Is a NATO-Russia war over Ukraine likely? Not today. But is it still possible? More than most Western leaders are willing to admit.
And if war comes, it will not arrive with fanfare or strategy. It will not be declared. It will unfold, like all great tragedies, slowly, then all at once. It will emerge from misjudgment, drift and the kind of political theatre that disguises itself as prudence.
We must start with what the tragedians knew. Aeschylus taught that the hubris of kings leads to the fall of cities. Euripides warned that democracies, when swayed by passion and panic, can become just as reckless as tyrants. Thucydides chronicled the disintegration of norms and restraint in a time of protracted war.
Shakespeare showed us the fatal convergence of pride, misperception and political paralysis. In 'Coriolanus,' the warrior cannot adjust to the world of speech and compromise. In 'King Lear,' misread love and rash judgment tear a kingdom apart. In 'Macbeth,' ambition overtakes judgment and fate completes the ruin.
All these patterns now haunt our world.
Vladimir Putin does not want open war with NATO. Despite rhetorical bluster, his aims remain limited — territorial consolidation in eastern Ukraine, political domination in Kyiv and the erosion of Western will. His military, despite recent advances, is depleted and its elite formations are gone. Russian casualties are staggering at more than a million and counting. Equipment is being replaced with imports from North Korea, Iran and China. Putin is not preparing to fight NATO — he is struggling to sustain pressure on Ukraine.
NATO is doing what Western coalitions always do — too much to stay neutral, too little to be decisive. We arm Ukraine, train its soldiers, share intelligence, approve long-range strikes and now flirt openly with deploying military trainers. France has said the quiet part aloud. The F-16s are arriving. The British support Ukrainian strikes inside Russia and American satellites guide them. The U.S., after a long and bruising domestic delay, has resumed aid. But there is no strategy — only momentum.
This is not escalation by choice but by gravity.
Like Macbeth, NATO is 'stepp'd in so far' that going back seems harder than going on. We committed to defend Ukraine's sovereignty, then to ensure its survival. Now, by increments, we have assumed a role not quite of belligerent, but no longer of mere benefactor. And yet, we tell ourselves, the line holds.
But history — especially tragic history — warns otherwise.
In 2022, a Ukrainian air defense missile landed in Poland, killing two civilians. In 2024, Russian drones crossed into Romanian airspace. In March 2025, a missile strike near Lviv killed a Polish aid worker. All of these were treated as incidents — explained, managed, defused. But what they were, in truth, was rehearsal.
One day, something will go wrong. A NATO logistics node is struck, a drone crosses a border or a Russian jet is downed near a surveillance platform. And then we are no longer theorizing. Article Five of the NATO Treaty will be triggered or invoked in language that demands a response. And then the tragic gears will be fully engaged.
What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is not just the fog of war — it is the fog of politics.
President Trump views NATO as a bad deal. He has mused that the U.S. might not defend allies who fall short of its defense spending targets. He has even said, in so many words, that he might let Russia do what it will.
Deterrence depends on credibility, and right now, American credibility is cracked.
This does not mean war will happen. But it does mean Putin may begin to believe he has space to test. He will not do it with tanks, but with subtler tools — cyber operations, deniable drone strikes, and sabotage campaigns, all calibrated to slip just below NATO's threshold of response. If the alliance flinches, the structure begins to come apart. And if it overreacts, we are in the grip of escalation.
Here is where Thucydides speaks most clearly. In his account of the Peloponnesian War, what doomed Athens was not just power — it was misperception, fear and the belief that retreat was more dangerous than advance. The tragic irony, of course, is that the war they sought to avoid through deterrence was made inevitable by their own actions.
'The strong do what they can,' as he put it. 'The weak suffer what they must.' But in war, even the strong can suffer from their own illusions. We are not Athens, but nor are we immune to the illusions that doomed it.
There are still pathways out. The first is what we have now: a grinding, bounded conflict. Ukraine bleeds; Russia advances in inches; NATO arms and advises, coming ever closer to the line. But the line holds. This is the path of inertia — not peace, not war, but something cold and hot all at once.
The second is diplomatic resolution. This would mean a partition of Ukraine and would require the West to abandon its rhetoric of total Ukrainian victory and begin speaking of equilibrium and realism. It would mean admitting that not all wrongs can be righted. The ancients called this 'sophrosyne' — wisdom born of restraint. But such restraint is in short supply.
The third is fracture. NATO, under Trump, may become an alliance in name only. NATO may persist, but its collective will may wither. That invites testing — and testing invites failure.
And the fourth is escalation — a tragedy, a war no one wants, but perhaps no one stops, not because it was planned, but because it became inevitable only after the final misjudgment. As Hamlet says, 'If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now … the readiness is all.' But readiness is not foresight. And even Hamlet could not prevent what followed.
This is the true lesson of tragedy — not fatalism, but warning.
Tragedy teaches that greatness without wisdom becomes destruction, that power without restraint becomes ruin. That delay, disguise and moral theatre are not substitutes for strategy. NATO and Russia may not be fated for war. But they are now in the tragic position of actors in a play whose ending remains unwritten, but whose arc is becoming familiar.
So we must resist the fantasy of control. We must think tragically — not as an excuse for paralysis, but as a summons to vigilance. Shakespeare, Thucydides and the Greek tragedians left us a mirror. In it, we see our ambition and fear — and the cost of not knowing ourselves until the final act.
A NATO-Russia war is still avoidable. But the moment of choice is not infinite. And the stage is being set.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.