The Limits Of Wike’s Rainbow Coalition

Long before modern electioneering reduced statecraft to mere transactional diplomacy, Thucydides recorded in his History of the Peloponnesian War that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. Yet when power seeks to expand beyond its organic frontiers, even the most formidable empires encounter the unyielding boundaries of institutional self-preservation. When Xerxes I marched his vast, multi-ethnic horde across the Hellespont, he believed that sheer numerical variety and central imperial directive could overrule the fierce, localized discipline of the Greek city-states. History ultimately recorded that an unwieldy army composed of disparate, coerced contingents f...