In his opening remarks at his summit with Donald Trump on May 15, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, invoked the fifth-century BC Greek historian Thucydides to issue a veiled warning to the US president.
“The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”
Thucydides has been surprisingly prominent in international affairs this year. In January, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney cited the famous line from the Melian Dialogue, that the “strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, to warn against the decline of a rules-based order. Others have quoted it to describe US military action in Venezuela and Iran – both positively and negatively.
Xi looked instead to Thucydides’ view of the “truest, though least discussed, reason” for the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The most familiar translation of his words, from 1875, is that: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear this aroused in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”
American international relations scholar Graham Allison developed from this the idea of Thucydides’s Trap. Thucydides’ stated goal was that readers would find his history useful for understanding future events. So, Allison argued, we can turn his words into a general principle: when an “established power” like Sparta is confronted with a “rising power” like Athens, conflict is usually the result.
History, claims Allison, bears this out. Across the centuries, 12 out of 16 examples of an established great power facing an upstart rival have resulted in war, including the two world wars. Will this also be the case between the USA, the global hegemon since the Soviet Union collapsed, and a resurgent China challenging its dominance, especially economically?
Three traps
Allison’s idea was much discussed. In 2017, he was invited to the White House to talk about it in relation to China and the US. So Xi’s mention of the Thucydides Trap was less a new idea than a call-back to the first Trump presidency. The theory has been taken seriously by the Chinese government, if only as a guide to American thinking. It has been identified as one of three traps faced by China today, together with the Tacitus Trap and the Middle Income Trap.
Discussion of the Thucydides Trap has largely focused on Allison’s account of the contemporary situation. Debate has centred on whether his characterisation of the US-China relationship is correct, and whether the advent of nuclear weapons and/or economic interdependence has changed the dynamic.
Allison offered the Thucydides Trap as a warning, to encourage both governments to pursue compromise and cooperation. The risk is that the established power might think Thucydides is telling them to suppress potential rivals before they become a threat – even if that makes war more likely. Hence Xi’s emphasis on avoiding the trap. But China hawks see that as a ruse to delay conflict until the balance of power is more even.
Cautionary tale
Since this is presented as a theory grounded in historical data and the authority of Thucydides, it is worth noting that it is questionable on both counts. Characterising many past conflicts as concerning just two rival powers, established and rising, is dubious; was the first world war just about Britain and Germany, for example?
EPA/Maxim Shemetov/pool
As for Thucydides, the crucial line is a very loose translation of what he actually wrote, which is much more ambiguous. A more literal version: “Athens becoming great caused the Spartans to fear, and compelled towards war.” Compelled whom? Thucydides doesn’t specify. The Spartans? (And if so, were they actually compelled, or simply felt themselves to be compelled?) Both sides? Or the whole situation? Is he just being unclear – or is this deliberate, to push his readers to think more deeply?
Having offered this opaque and slightly ambiguous statement, Thucydides then presented a detailed narrative of the events leading to Sparta’s declaration of war. This included many points where things might arguably have turned out differently. His interpretation emphasised both short- and long-term developments, and both individual decisions and emotions as well as structural factors. His “trap” is much more complex – and it’s definitely not inevitable.
This is very familiar to discerning readers of Thucydides. His work doesn’t offer straightforward laws of war and politics, but sets out the complexity of human behaviour in a way which prompts us to think more deeply about it. But his ideas are often wrongly presented as simplistic principles that supposedly explain the world.
Trump’s response to Xi – that the USA may have been in decline under Biden but it’s now the hottest country ever – is a misreading even of Allison’s simplified version of Thucydides. The “Trap” theory says nothing about decline, only that the established superpower now faces a rival.
But anxiety about decline and decadence now pervades western thought. Perhaps this is evidence for the same sort of fear that came to govern Spartan thinking and, as Thucydides himself recounted, drew both states into a destructive war.
