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they were by communist forces, just as Athens was lured into Sicily by its local allies there, which were threatened by other Sicilian city-states loyal to Athens’s rival, Syracuse, in turn an ally of Sparta. Just as the Kennedy administration began with the dispatch of limited Special Operations Forces to Vietnam, a commitment that grew under the administration of Lyndon Johnson to over half a million regular troops, the Athenian intervention in Sicily began with twenty ships in support of its anti-Syracusan allies, and quickly grew to one hundred triremes, numerous transport ships, and five thousand hoplites, so that the prestige of Athens’s entire maritime empire was seemingly dependent upon a military victory in far-off Sicily. Athens kept pouring in manpower. The Sicilian Expedition ended with the annihilation of forty thousand Athenian troops, of whom six thousand survived to labor in the quarries of Syracuse and be sold into slavery. The American intervention in Vietnam ended with the communist North overrunning the South, with the last Americans fleeing by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
    Paralyzed by pessimism and recriminations, it was some time before Athens was willing to resume in earnest the bipolar conflict with Sparta. America, too, suffered a serious crisis of confidence following the debacle in Vietnam, standing by as the Soviet Union and its allies threatened American allies and toppled regimes in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. Now Vietnam looms in America’s destiny once again. Once again the Vietnamese are pleading for America’s help. This time the pleas are subtle and quiet, and no ground troops are being asked for. This time it is not a war that theywant America to fight: it is only the balance of power that they want America to maintain. They want America as a sturdy air and naval presence in the South China Sea for decades to come. Vietnam and its destiny, either as a quasi-vassal state of China or as a staunch resister of Chinese hegemony, offers a telling illustration of what the United States provides the world that is at risk if the U.S. declines; or if the U.S. should ever retreat into quasi-isolationism or be diverted elsewhere.
    China’s economy is in trouble, we know. But the possibility of a U.S. decline, or at least a very partial military withdrawal from the world, has to be taken as a possibility, too. The American economy is recovering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the cost of air and naval platforms is becoming prohibitive. The price of a new
Gerald R. Ford
-class aircraft carrier is $12 billion with no aircraft or other equipment on its deck. The price tag according to the latest design of a
Zumwalt
-class destroyer is close to $4 billion. The F-22 Raptor cost $200 million a plane and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter $135 million. In addition to the cost of projecting air and naval power around the world—and particularly in East Asia—there is the very real imperial fatigue felt by the American public, and by some influential sections of the defense and foreign policy elite in Washington, following the ruinous cost in lives, diplomatic prestige, and monetary expense of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iraq War, a far-flung military adventure like Vietnam, though it may not have ended in ignominious defeat or a similar cost in lives, can, too, be compared in some respects to the Sicilian Expedition. Will the United States lose its nerve this time around in Asia, as happened after Vietnam, and as happened to Athens after the misadventure in Sicily?
    Following the Vietnam War, the Cold War with its attendant Soviet threat kept the United States engaged in the world. But now the threat is far more ambiguous. Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages