Wow when you said the next videos were coming out soon, you weren't kidding around! Clearly Pericles' wait and see strategies aren't bearing fruit for the channel.
Very nice videos. It's always great to see some accurate series about a war so forgotten yet so historically relevant as the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides would be proud :)
Reminds me a bit about the 20th century wars in Europe. I read somewhere that WWI was a war between the Germans and the Slavs for control of Eastern Europe, and that since in the end there was no obvious leader, WWII had to be fought to determine the outcome. In that same way, the many wars between Sparta and Athens are merged to be the same war, since until an obvious dominant force emerges, there can be no peace, only truce.
This viewpoint is common knowledge in eastern European populations (specifically the Polish and Russians), and yet is ignored in western Europe and America, who's people prefer the idea that the Second World War was an ideological war between fascism and democracy. However, this ethnic conflict didn't start a few years before the First World War, but in the tenth century.
Well... for WWI specifically, mainly in the sense that Balkans were the only 'unclaimed' spheres of influence left available to Austria (AUS-PRU war 1866) and Russia (RUS-JAP war 1905). If Russia had won RUS-JAP the 'Asiatic' lobby might well have shifted policy towards expansion in C Asia/China - to the grave concern of UK. BUT yes, geographers like Mackinder did see Eastern Europe as a key to Eurasian domination so geopolitically, you could argue there was some long-term underlying conflict there.
I find the comparison Herfried Münkler makes (a relatively famous historian and political scientist from Germany) between the 30 Years War and the Peloponesian War much more fitting than between the Pelop. War and the two World Wars: The line between War and Peace is much less clear in the 30 Years War and the conflict between Athens and Sparta. Treaties are disregarded, everywhere are rebellions spawning and the civilians are equally seen as targets as the soldiers (The incredible losses of the 30YW are results of the rampant marauding and looting of the mercenaries and the resulting famines and epidemics. Similarily the raiding of Sparta in Attika and Athens on the coasts of the Peloponnes, targeting the farms or the people to persuade them to defect) Here is an Interview with him, where he talks a bit about the similarities between the 30YW and the Pelop. War (if you understand german ofc): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jlrQLJi5lDU.html
