You don’t often find the philosopher Donald Trump of Queens and the historian Thucydides of Athens in the same article. Kudos, as Thucydides would say to Foreign Policy magazine.

A Foreign Policy contributor from the Rand Corp. argued last April that Trump is running a “grand experiment” in realist theory, the view of international relations that the wonks trace to Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War. In January, the president’s first-term National Security Council chief, Alexander Gray, told the Guardian that his former boss was a “foreign policy realist in the tradition of Nixon and Kissinger.” The New York Times agreed, so it must be true. Realism, the outlet said, gives Trump “a blank check for aggression.”