I am trying to reconcile the Spartan land dominance of this thread with @BretDevereaux’s fascinating and compelling “The Myth of Sparta” essays and I need help.https://twitter.com/Roelkonijn/status/1412107564452548612 …
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Indeed, the Spartan failure is in translating that cohesive advantage into durable strategic results. It's a Ends-Ways-Means problem: they have some means (cohesive hoplite battle) but no sense of how to connect that to a set of ways which result in the ends they want.
This is, of course, not an uncommon problem, c.f. the USA trying to bomb countries into friendship; bombs traditionally have the opposite result. But Sparta failed to learn their way out of that mismatch for about as long as the USA has been a country.
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Although the fact that the US is on course to spectacularly lose a war later this year in exactly the same way they lost the Vietnam War less than 50 years ago does suggest that *both* places had/have a problem learning from history.
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Sure, although one has to square that with the, in the end, successful counter-insurgency in Iraq. Also, to give the USA credit here, US-Vietnamese relations are now quite friendly and Vietnam is sometimes listed as a potential future US ally. A meaningful strategic shift.
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