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December 5 - December 9, 2023
Read in context, it is clear that he meant his claim about inevitability as hyperbole: exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis.
But the founder of history believed that the most obvious causes for bloodshed mask even more significant ones. More important than the sparks that lead to war, Thucydides teaches us, are the structural factors that lay its foundations: conditions in which otherwise manageable events can escalate with unforeseeable severity and produce unimaginable consequences.
the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that engulfed his homeland, the city-state of Athens, in the fifth century BCE, and which in time came to consume almost the entirety of ancient Greece. A former soldier, Thucydides watched as Athens challenged the dominant Greek power of the day, the martial city-state of Sparta.
Intentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception.
Thucydides’s Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. This can happen in any sphere. But its implications are most dangerous in international affairs.
In a single generation, a nation that did not appear on any of the international league tables has vaulted into the top spot. In 1980, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) was less than $300 billion; by 2015, it was $11 trillion—making it the world’s second-largest economy by market exchange rates. In 1980, China’s trade with the outside world amounted to less than $40 billion; by 2015, it had increased one hundredfold, to $4 trillion.4 For every two-year period since 2008, the increment of growth in China’s GDP has been larger than the entire economy of India.5 Even at its lower growth rate
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world’s leading professor–central banker, former MIT professor Stanley Fischer,
For all the noise about the Chinese economic slowdown, remember one incandescent fact: since the Great Recession, 40 percent of all the growth around the world has occurred in just one country: China.25
Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement than the US did in the entire twentieth century.30 In 2011, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days.31 Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years.32
The internationally recognized gold standard for comparing education performance among high school students is the Program for International Student Assessment. On the 2015 PISA test, China ranked sixth in mathematics while the United States ranked thirty-ninth. China’s score was well above the OECD average, while the US score was significantly below. Even the highest-rated American state, Massachusetts, would stand just twentieth if it were measured as its own country in the rankings—a drop from its ninth-place rating when the test was last conducted, in 2012.48
China primarily conducts foreign policy through economics because, to put it bluntly, it can. It is currently the largest trading partner for over 130 countries—including all the major Asian economies.
“Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.”
that a military clash would be intended to secure: “Far better than challenging the enemy on the field of battle is . . . maneuvering him into an unfavorable position from which escape is impossible.”71 In economic relations today, China is doing just that.
Nations that have become dependent on China’s supply of key imports, and on Chinese markets for their exports, are particularly vulnerable: when disagreements arise, China simply delays the first and blocks the second. Notable cases include China’s abrupt cessation of all exports of rare metals to Japan in 2010 (to persuade Japan to return several Chinese fishermen it had detained); its zeroing out of salmon purchases from what had been Norway’s number-one market in 2011 (to punish Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s selection of a noted Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo); and its
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China’s combined international development finance assets in 2016 were $130 billion larger than those of the six major Western development banks combined.
At this point, OBOR includes 900 projects at a cost exceeding $1.4 trillion. Even after adjusting for inflation, this amounts to 12 Marshall Plans, according to the investor and former IMF economist Stephen Jen.74
“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
Athens, by contrast, was a port city on a dry and bare promontory of Attica that took pride in its culture. Isolated from the rest of mainland Greece by high and sparsely populated mountains, Athens had always been a trading nation, supplied by the merchants who crisscrossed the Aegean Sea selling olive oil and timber, textiles and precious stones. Unlike Sparta’s garrison state, Athens was an open society, its academies enrolling students from across Greece. And after centuries of rule by strongmen, Athens had also begun a bold, new political experiment in what it called democracy. Its
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Sparta had a mixed political system that blended monarchy and oligarchy. It rarely intervened in the affairs of faraway nations, focusing instead on preventing a Helot rebellion at home and on securing its regional predominance. Spartans were proud of their distinctive culture. But, unlike the Athenians, they did not seek to persuade other states to follow their model. Despite its imposing infantry, Sparta was a conservative, status quo power.
When states repeatedly fail to act in what appears to be their true national interest, it is often because their policies reflect necessary compromises among parties within their government rather than a single coherent vision.
The war proved as devastating as Archidamus predicted. Three decades of bloodshed between Athens and Sparta brought the golden age of Greek culture to an end. The order that had developed after the Persian wars, based on agreed constraints and reinforced by a balance of power, collapsed—flinging the Greek city-states into levels of violence even their playwrights had not previously been able to imagine.
“You know as well as we do that right is a question that only has meaning in relations between equals in power. In the real world, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
the fundamental explanation lies in the depth of the structural stress between a rising and a ruling power.
this rivalry led Athens and Sparta into successive standoffs, the most passionate voices in each political system grew louder, their sense of pride stronger, their claims about threats posed by the adversary more pointed, and their challenge to leaders who sought to keep the peace more severe. Thucydides identifies three primary drivers fueling this dynamic that lead to war: interests, fear, and honor.
Thucydides’s concept encompasses what we now think of as a state’s sense of itself, its convictions about the recognition and respect it is due, and its pride. As Athens’s power grew over the fifth century, so too did its sense of entitlement.
While each was playing chess against the other, at the same time, each was also contending with domestic political constituents who increasingly believed that failing to stand up to the other would be both dishonorable and disastrous.
His point was that as Athens grew more powerful and Sparta grew more anxious, the two countries chose paths that made it increasingly difficult to avoid war. As the stakes rose, Athenian assertiveness swelled into hubris; Spartan insecurity festered into paranoia.
“The vicious circle of reprisals and counter reprisals is on . . . The obvious conclusion is eventual war.”
Bismarck provides a textbook example of exploitation of the ruling power syndrome: taking advantage of exaggerated fears, insecurities, and dread of changes in the status quo to provoke a reckless response.
psychological level, noting that people’s fears of loss (or intimations of “decline”) trump our hopes of gain—driving us to take often unreasonable risks to protect what is ours.
We typically see ourselves as more benign than we are, and are quicker to attribute malign motives to potential adversaries. Because states can never be certain about each other’s intent, they focus instead on capabilities.
His urgency sprang from his conviction that the German surge at sea signaled not a national security challenge but an existential threat to Britain’s survival.
But the problems are very difficult. One has to try to measure the indefinite and weigh the imponderable.”
In the end, Crowe concluded that Germany’s intentions were irrelevant; its capabilities were what mattered.
“both policeman and banker to the world . . . the first true superpower.”
“by our actions that the vigor and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that
our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen.”
the Boers (descendants of Dutch settlers in what is today South Africa)
“invulnerable at sea . . . Every deficiency would have to be made good, every gap filled, every contingency anticipated.”
he refused to succumb to determinism.
like Britain, the United States jealously guards its primacy on the world stage, and is determined to resist Chinese attempts to revise the global political order.
According to the law of nature one rules whatever one can. We did not make this law. We found it when we came to power, and we shall leave it to those who come after us. —Thucydides, Athenians to Melians, 416 BCE
Believing determination to be the handmaid of destiny,
“ultimately those who wish to see this country at peace with foreign nations will be wise if they place reliance upon a first-class fleet of first-class battleships rather than on any arbitration treaty which the wit of man can devise.”11
“Roosevelt was the first president to deliberately project American power on the global stage.”
Bunau-Varilla quickly negotiated a treaty that gave the US rights “in perpetuity” to the future canal in return for $10 million up front and $250,000 annually.
bargain likely deprived Panama of yearly revenue anywhere
from 1.2 to 3.7 times its annual GDP.63
“You have shown that you were
accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”
