A new dynamic has taken hold as Russia’s full-scale war of aggression in Ukraine grinds through its fifth year. Kyiv now strikes with regularity and precision deep in Moscow’s heartland, crippling energy infrastructure and supply lines. Advances are a thing of the past along a frozen front where drones impose a fearsome kill zone no one seems able to escape, but which now favors the Ukrainian defenders.
This welcome shift for Ukraine and its supporters underscores a related but more consequential change with farther-reaching implications. While attention has understandably focused on the war itself, and particularly the extraordinary impact of drones and autonomous weapons, Ukraine has, through a gradual process of trial and error, transformed itself into a specific and successful type of middle power—militarized, cohesive, innovative and agile.
Sparta is an oft-invoked archetype. Ukraine has been described as a “modern-day Sparta,” none other than Benjamin Netanyahu has called for Israel to become a “super-Sparta,” and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly dubbed the UAE a “little Sparta.” Militarized states are a fixture of modern history. What is exceptional today is the number of states eager to adopt the model, the updates they are making to the original concept, and the outsize influence they are having. Aided by technology that favors the underdog and abetted by the feuds exhausting Washington, Moscow and Beijing, these leaner, meaner players are at the cusp of a paradigm shift. They are bringing the much-ballyhooed era of renewed great power competition to a close before it really got off the ground, and opening the door to a messier world still in the making.
The new Spartas punch above their weight in war. They have coherent narratives about themselves, often rooted in past trauma and rife with potential for future conflict. They are unsentimental adherents of Realpolitik. They make up for what they may lack in size or strength with wile and guile. They are better suited to the challenges of the current century than the lumbering “great powers” whose competition was supposed to be its dominant motif, or smaller states that place their faith in “international law” or a just world order. The new Spartas, we will argue here, are the key to understanding the peculiar conditions of the present and the likely next foreign policy paradigm.
Ukraine as the New Sparta
The original Sparta required all of its male citizens to spend most of their adult lives living in barracks and serving in the military. Ukraine, though fending off a massive onslaught from its larger, nuclear-armed neighbor for over four years, is not able to go this far. The country declared martial law and a general mobilization after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, but initially set the minimum draft age high at 27, and only lowered it to 25 in 2024. Men eligible for service – those between the ages of 25 and 60 – are forbidden to travel abroad. Tours of duty with no end date, harsh conditions at the front, and the occasional rounding up of recruits outside of gyms caught on television camera have contributed to widespread draft evasion and a prolonged manpower crisis. Corruption has plagued both travel exemptions and other types of deferment but with the appointment of Mykhailo Fedorov to the role of Minister of Defense, there are high hopes that this problem will soon be addressed. Ukraine has managed—just barely at times—to keep enough of its population in uniform to maintain the war effort.
Spartan women enjoyed greater economic and political rights than women in other Greek city states of the same period. Ukrainian women are a crucial part of the war effort. With more than 130,000 women in the defense and security sector, including 10,000 at the frontline, female soldiers serve in any role, including combat. In addition to the vital service women provide in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, they are assuming new leadership roles in the public and private sectors. For example, they are opening businesses at an unprecedented rate. In 2025, women started more than 60 percent of new businesses in Ukraine. Women hold many of the top positions in the government of Ukraine, including prime minister and Ukrainian ambassador to the United States.
The original male Spartans described themselves as “Homoioi,” meaning those who are alike, or equal. This was a direct result of the barracks culture that dominated their existence, but its significance lay in the cohesion it imparted. Ukraine is a more diverse and complex society, but cohesion is just as important in wartime conditions. The Ukrainian national idea, shorn in its modern iteration of the more divisive and exclusionary elements it acquired in the twentieth century, helps, as does the presence of an enemy bent on the destruction of Ukraine as a state and on the elimination of Ukrainian identity itself.
The concept of Ukrainian identity changed after the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-2014. In the past, Ukrainian identity was tied to ethnic identity, but after the democratic revolution it underwent a realignment based on values. Anyone who supported a European trajectory for Ukraine and rejected Russian subjugation was in. Jews, Greeks, Tatar, Armenians, Georgians, and even ethnic Russians could be Ukrainian. The war further expanded the parameters of what it means to be Ukrainian, with many non-Ukrainians identifying as “Ukrainians by choice” after the full-scale invasion.
Cohesion facilitated the mobilization of society during the war. Since 2022, volunteers have raised millions of dollars to outfit the military. At the outset, as men enlisted, the government lacked proper footwear, uniforms, helmets and body armor. Across the globe, Ukraine’s supporters raised funds and scoured websites to find new and used kit for soldiers. Kyiv also lacked sufficient ammunition and funds. Domestic Ukrainian volunteer organizations such as Come Back Alive and the Serhiy Prytula Foundation filled the need, raising millions of dollars for the purchase of drones. As the war went on, Ukraine’s needs changed, and volunteers responded by delivering generators, tents, and power banks to prevent Ukrainians from freezing to death over the long winter months of late 2025 and early 2026. It is no exaggeration to say that without the extraordinary efforts of Ukraine’s domestic and international volunteers, the country might not still be in the fight today.
Innovation channeled through a cohesive society supercharges military power. Ukraine’s much-vaunted drone industry rightfully receives enormous attention. More than 500 Ukrainian manufacturers now crank out nearly 10 million first-person view drones a year for the battlefield. Airborne drones are only part of the story. Ukraine forced the Russian Black Sea Fleet to relocate its vessels hundreds of miles away after Kyiv’s unmanned sea vehicles sank boat after boat. An educational bias toward science and math, a skilled workforce, and the exigencies of an existential fight have also given rise to a hybrid air defense approach the U.S. military is currently studying, and a battle management system that uses artificial intelligence.
To navigate a perilous world, today’s Sparta must be agile, even opportunistic. In the early years of the war, President Zelenskyy used his global celebrity status to secure the support of western allies even as he pushed back against the limits they placed on the use of specific weapons systems. When a skeptical President Trump retook the White House, Ukraine resisted American pressure to cut a deal with Russia even as it pivoted to deal-making with the Europeans to ensure continued military support.
What Makes a Modern Sparta?
Israel and Rwanda are the two most obvious candidates for the “new Sparta” label. Both have cohesive national myths forged in trauma. Rwanda has no direct equivalent of Israel’s “start-up nation” tech sector, but it has pioneered a nationwide network of drone deliveries for medical supplies and aggressively digitized government services. What both countries unquestionably have are battle-tested militaries that range far and wide. Isreal is the preeminent military power in the Middle East. It has bombed Iran and Yemen, and conducted extensive ground operations in Lebanon. Rwandan troops have been active from the Central Africa Republic to Mozambique, and Rwandan influence is a driving factor in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo. That these interventions have just as often caused chaos as they have delivered decisive outcomes is a feature, not a bug, that we will discuss.
In Europe, Poland has embarked on a massive military build-up that rests on spending that now nears five percent of GDP, the highest in NATO, along with multi-billion-dollar weapons procurements, increased local manufacturing, and a recruitment target of 500,000 personnel in the armed forces by 2039. Finland and Estonia, though much smaller, are intent on strengthening their capabilities. Like Poland, they have cohesive national ideas grounded in resistance to Russian aggression, as well as vibrant economies with strong tech sectors.
More ambiguous cases are the United Arab Emirates and Eritrea. Both wield military influence beyond their borders. The UAE in particular has intervened as far away as Libya, while Eritrea has intervened in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Sudan and Somalia. Eritrea’s 30-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia gave it a cohesive national story, but its ruling dictatorship has hardly encouraged innovation or economic growth. The UAE presents the opposite profile, with a more dynamic, diversified economy than its neighbors but a diffuse sense of national identity diluted by a huge number of expatriates and guest workers.
Iran and North Korea are two other edge cases. The former’s proxies have wrought havoc across the region; the latter’s troops are dying in occupied Ukraine. Their national myths, both rooted in revolution and ideology, are potent, but their cohesion, such as it is, rests on repression. Neither is a bastion of innovation beyond the bomb-making and cloak-and-dagger plots.
Sparta’s Weakness
The new Spartan model has its share of downsides. Militarization pairs uneasily with democratic politics. Rwanda is a military dictatorship led by a former intelligence chief. Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, a veteran of an elite commando unit, has dominated his country’s politics for decades. Ukraine’s next leader is almost certain to come from the ranks of its armed forces. Israel and Ukraine are democracies, but with anti-democratic elements still strong in their political systems.
Cohesion forged by trauma and conflict can produce more of the same. Rwanda’s President Kagame led the Tutsi rebel force that put an end to a genocide perpetrated by radicals in the country’s Hutu majority. Subsequent official policies to prevent a recurrence of ethnic violence, while successful, have curtailed freedoms within Rwanda. Rwandan incursions into neighboring countries, ostensibly intended to nip the plans of fugitive Hutu genocidaires in the bud, have fueled decades of violence. Israel’s troubled history with its Arab minority and neighbors, occupied Palestinian lands, and increasing embrace of ethnonationalism may be the best-documented clash of its kind in the world today. In Ukraine and Poland, historical narratives rooted in trauma consolidate each country separately but clash when they come into contact. They are now tearing apart Polish-Ukrainian relations as elections near in Poland.
Innovation can be hard to maintain in concert with the pressures that produce Spartan militarization and cohesion. Ukraine would benefit from ending its backroom defense deals and letting everyone compete for start-up capital. President Zelenskyy and his team are in the process of changing this, but they are not going fast enough. Israel is coping with an outflux of some of its most highly educated citizens amid conflicts that seem to have no easy resolution. Rwanda’s Kigali Innovation City is heavily reliant on state support, and has thus far produced less impressive results than Lagos, Nigeria, where a more organic approach has seen the emergence of at least five “unicorns,” or billion-dollar start-ups.
Sparta’s Strength
For all their flaws, the new Spartas have the same virtue as the old Sparta. They are optimized for fighting. This matters because war is back in a big way. Conflicts between states have doubled in recent years. Nothing points to a reversal of the trend.
Ethnonationalism, that reliable handmaiden of armed conflict, is on the rise. The world’s two most populous nations are cases in point. Under Xi Jin Ping, China has promoted a doctrine of Chinese community in which Han culture is the “trunk” of a tree, while ethnic minorities are subsidiary “branches and leaves.” India’s Narendra Modi has enshrined Hindutva, or Hindu-ness, as the organizing principle of the state, substantially changing the vision of the country’s more constitutionally minded founders and imperiling the rights of religious minorities. Putin’s Russia and the United States under President Trump, though both diverse polities, have seen a remarkable high-level embrace of ethnonationalism. European right-wing parties, while still outnumbered by liberal alternatives, continue to improve their electoral results.
It is the changing nature of warfare itself that holds out the greatest promise to the new Spartas. Ukraine’s experience has showcased the immense importance of autonomous weapons systems and drones to an overmatched underdog. Iran, though no match for U.S. firepower, was able to wreak havoc in the Gulf with drones, and Lebanese Hizballah did the same to Israel (demonstrating that the new Spartas themselves are not immune to the levelling effects of modern weaponry).
The broad arc bodes ill for the so-called great powers. Russia, which seemed to have a significant advantage on paper at the outset, has definitively bogged down in Ukraine. The United States struggled to translate military superiority into a favorable outcome with Iran, as it has struggled in similar situations for decades. China, for all its buildup, remains untested as a military power. If Ukraine and Israel can maintain their military edge and cohesion while continuing to innovate, their model could prove contagious.
Spartan World
We have argued that smaller and medium-sized states organized like ancient Sparta around a powerful military are poised to set much of the international agenda. The larger powers like the United States, Russia and even China, are increasingly beset by internal problems. War will once again be a common continuation of politics by other means, and modern war with robots, drones and AI favors defenders and underdogs. Ukraine and Israel have put forward a model that holds out promise for smaller states, many of which are already going down the road of increased militarization.
We were supposed to be in an age of renewed great power competition. Smaller states would succeed or fail depending on how they maneuvered among the giants. The Spartan world could be a more equitable, but also more contentious, place. Democracy and human rights could fall by the wayside, although Ukraine’s commitment to those causes—for now—offers encouraging signs. But the comparison with Israel and Rwanda also shows the risks of permanent militarization, hardened nationalism, and pressure on democratic values.
Ukraine, and other prospective Spartas, would be well-served to mine Finland’s history for instruction. Post-war Finland was highly militarized but became an economic powerhouse with a culture of public service and national defense while pursuing a neutral foreign policy.
The new Spartan formula could, in the best case, be a recipe for varied democratic polities with distinct national characteristics and an emphasis on education and invention—a vibrant checkerboard of start-up nations. In the worst, it could represent a return to the militarized madness that drowned in twentieth-century Europe in blood. It presages large, messy debates over democracy, human rights and national identity, and a broader canvas for potential clashes than those that flow from the competing designs of Washinton, Beijing and Moscow.
The Thucydides Trap posits an inevitable clash between a rising power and an established one. In Thucydides’ day, this pitted Athens against Sparta. Today, China is supposedly squaring off against the United States. But what if this is the wrong lesson to draw? Sparta bested Athens in the Peloponnesian War, though both soon went into eclipse. We may be witnessing the birth pangs of an era redolent with echoes of Sparta’s success and rife with possibilities for rising powers.
