Can Thucydides Teach Us Why We Go to War?

'A contemporary scholar uses the ancient Greek historian to explain the 1968 Pueblo Crisis in North Korea.'

Matthew Wills reports at Jstor Daily.

"On January 23, 1968, naval forces from North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK) captured the U.S.S. Pueblo in the Sea of Japan. The Pueblo was a spy ship gathering signals intelligence from Soviet submarines and both naval and land-based communications from the DPRK. The vessel does seem to have been in international waters, at least twelve miles from the coast—but the North Koreans, who have long maintained an intense interest in maritime security, claimed a fifty-mile limit. One American sailor was killed in the capture. The eighty-two surviving members of the crew were held for eleven months."

See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 6, and (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 5.