Looking at things from a world political point of view the right comparison has always been of America to Athens. Thomas Paine said that "what Athens was in mi

Looking at things from a world political point of view the right comparison has always been of America to Athens. Thomas Paine said that "what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude", and he wasn't wrong. The Persians and the Spartans were like the CCP and the USSR, while Athens was like the U.S., the Delian League was like NATO, Athens making Delian League members contribute ships and oarsmen or tribute being not too unlike the U.S. demanding that NATO members spend a certain percentage of GDP on their militaries, Sparta was a super-slave power, but Athens also had slavery, just nowhere near as bad as Sparta and of a fairly different character, etc. In the end Sparta allied with the Persians to defeat the Athenians and thence Athens was a superpower no more. Then the Thebans wiped the Spartans from the face of the Earth. Then the Alexander and his Macedonians wiped the Thebans from the face of the Earth, and that was the end of ancient Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The analogies to the Peloponnesian wars aren't great if you pick nits about the order of events (Athens and Sparta fought the Persians before they fought each other, but the U.S. fought the USSR and we're in a sort of cold war with the CCP now), but otherwise the resemblance it's truly uncanny. Not that it helps predict the future, mind you, but that so far the resemblance is something else.