Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the just-released The End of Sparta.

The European Union and the United Nations, as well as globalization and advanced technology, were supposed to trump age-old cultural, geographical, and national differences and bring people together.

But for all the high-tech veneer of the 21st century, the world still looks very much as it did during the previous hundred years and well before that...

In response to all this depressing predictability, technocratic elites still dream up international solutions. The League of Nations was a noble idea that proved to be an irrelevant hothouse. No one still believes the pretentious United Nations is much more than a collective debating society. The non-democratic European Union is going the way of the megalomaniac and failed dreams of Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler of one united European continent, one system, one ideology.

What, then, are we left with? Only the humility of knowing that human nature does not change much....