I find it endlessly fascinating how often we attempt to frame the problems of today in terms of older, more ancient paradigms. We speak casually of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, or the destruction of Assyria, as evidence that all empires eventually fail, ignoring that the former survived half a millennium and the latter for an astounding 1,900 years. Talking heads expound upon the nature of class warfare drawing parallels between the modern-day lower classes and the serfs of Imperial Russia. Yet it always makes me wonder just how closely these so-called experts are actually reading and thus understanding history . . . or if they, like most opinion-makers today, are just cherry-picking the historical facts that support their claims while ignoring the mountain of evidence that undercut them.
Anyone who’s spent any time reading and watching news related to international relations over the past few years has probably heard the term “Thucydides Trap”. Generally, the term refers to a proposed inevitability of armed conflict that arises when a hegemonic power lashes out against a rising one. It is used, in modern terms, as a warning to the United States—cast as the hegemonic power—in its dealings with China—purported to be the rising power. In fact, Xi Jinping himself is supposed to have used the term in at least one of his speeches.
No surprise, really, as the last thing China wants is an armed conflict with the United States and—presumably—that nation’s vast network of regional and global allies. Yet the validity of the Thucydides Trap as a model for predictive state-level behavior has come under attack, for some very interesting reasons, including those that have as much to do with the origin of the term as anything else.
Let’s start at the beginning. Thucydides was an Athenian, born sometime between 460 and 455 B.C. and dying around the year 400. Historian, general, and philosopher, Thucydides left behind multiple written works, the most important of which were the “Melian Dialogue” and a multi-volume “History of the Peloponnesian War”. Inspired by the writings of Herodotus, whose work “The Histories” he saw performed live, Thucydides dedicated his life to the recording of historical events and is today considered one of the ancient world’s most reliable historians.
This is not to say, of course that everything Thucydides wrote has to be taken as gospel, far from it. Like every other human who has ever walked the earth his frame of reference was limited to what he could see, hear, and read about. Thus, having survived childhood amid the backdrop of the Greco-Persians Wars of 499-449 B.C., the eruption of conflict between Greece’s most powerful city states, Athens and Sparta, must have seemed to Thucydides like the end of the world. All the more so as those two wars—separated by a six-year halftime of sorts—ended the challenge to Spartan dominance posed by Athens. More to the point, it led to him making certain assumptions about the nature of that competition—and all similar national-level competitions—reflected in the Thucydides Trap as currently debated.
Thucydides essentially stated that because Sparta at the time was dominant amongst the Greek city states, and Athens on the rise, it was inevitable that the former would seek armed conflict with the latter as a means of maintaining its preeminence. The implication is, of course, that the stronger extant power will generally seek to re-assert its military dominance, and thereby lengthen the period of its own hegemony, by knocking off its chief competitor while it is still nominally the weaker state. It’s easy to see why this concept would be so attractive for those studying or seeking to navigate the current state of world affairs, especially in East Asia.
The problem, as so rightly pointed out by detractors of the predictive theory promulgated by American political scientist Graham T. Allison, is that there were many other factors at play in the Athenian-Spartan relationship which drove them to war in 460 B.C. For its part, Athens began to be seen as a rising star at the conclusion of the Greco-Persian wars. After jointly taking the city of Byzantium, the Spartans decided that the war to drive the Persians out of Greece was complete, and ceased hostilities, returning home along with their closest allies. Athens argued that the Ionian Greek city-states in modern Turkey were still their countrymen—in fact most had begun as Athenian colonies—and yet required liberation from Persian rule. Athens, it seems, was determined to continue the fight, but they couldn’t do it alone.
This falling out over policy objectives, the definitive end of the first Peloponnesian League that withstood two Persian invasions, left the Athenians with no choice but to build another alliance. This resulted in the establishment of the Delian League which fought on against isolated Persian outposts from 470 to 449, including a disastrous campaign in far-away Egypt.
The bottom line is that Athens was never really in a position to militarily challenge Sparta, though Athenians enthusiastically played at being the great champions of Greek independence for as long as they could maintain that façade. In return, Athens collected the dues of Delian League city states that didn’t want to send troops, funds which in turn fueled continued colonization and bankrolled ever-increasing trade opportunities.
Adding to this challenge of the modern—and popular—conception of a Thucydides Trap is the fact that external factors, not just internal ones, drove Sparta to challenge the path Athens seemed intent upon traveling. In this case, the most effective of external factors was likely the presence and free flow of Persian funding. The Achaemenid Persian Empire hadn’t risen to its place in history as the first to have conquered lands on three separate continents by not knowing how to play the game. While two invasions of Greece had indeed been thwarted, the Persian Empire was vast, and encompassed many smaller kingdoms. Thus, when it came to military endeavors and subsequent losses of manpower in Greece, the “King of Kings” could afford to preempt the old Doritos commercial … “Crunch all you want, we’ll make more!”
The simple reality is that the efforts of the Athenian-led Delian League, while annoying out on the fringe of the Empire, were not overly dangerous to the basic security or economy of Persia writ-large. The Egyptian campaign, including a failed three-year siege against the Persian garrison at Memphis, actually threatened a core interest, and so clearly something needed to be done. The liquidation of Greek forces at Prosopitis in 455 was just the beginning, but these types of strictly military campaigns were costly both in terms of treasure and damaged infrastructure. The Persians, at this point, realized that so much more could be achieved with much less expenditure through other means.
This began a period wherein the Persian King Artaxerxes I—advised by an Athenian exile named Themistocles—began funding internecine Greek conflict. Initially funding the Spartan military build-up, the Persian intent was clearly to coax the Greek city-states, never so unified as they’d been during the Persian Wars, to fight one another instead. This influx of funding undoubtedly helped push Sparta into war with Athens, effectively removing the latter as a thorn in the Persian side for a generation.
A third attack on the concept of a Thucydides Trap is the nature of the two powers’ relative strengths. Athens was a trading power, backed by a strong fleet, and subsidized by the dues paid by members of the Delian League. Sparta was most certainly not interested in either trade or colonization and had, since the reforms of Lycurgus in the 8th Century B.C., dedicated itself and its entire male citizenry to an all-encompassing military lifestyle that yielded full-time professional armies. This, at a time when the rest of the Greek city-states, including Athens, followed a citizen-soldier model of part time warriors, made the Spartan hoplite preeminent on the Greek battlefield. Thus, Athens was never really a military power in its own right and its accomplishments as leader of the Delian League seem to have been aimed at doing just enough to keep membership dues flowing into Athenian coffers, but not enough to really challenge the power of Persia in the Eastern Mediterranean.
All of these attacks on the existence of a Thucydides Trap hold interesting ramifications for the concept’s application to the current state of competition between the U.S. and China. There too are many external factors that affect the problem beside the overly-simplistic assertion that a hegemonic power is likely to lash out militarily at a challenger in order to prolong that hegemony. The fact that the next largest economy in the world pecking order, Japan, resides in the neighborhood as well, and is thoroughly and irrevocably in the U.S. camp, must be taken into account as a significant external factor. As indeed must be Singapore and South Korea, economic powerhouses all!
Next, while China has worked hard to peddle influence and buy cooperation across the region and, in fact, further abroad in places like the Pacific Island nations, Afghanistan, and Africa, heavy-handed Chinese government treatment of these potential partners has soured relations in a way the Athenians would certainly have been careful to avoid. Thus even foreign states critical to China’s close-in national security framework like Vietnam and the Philippines are already starting to recoil from the larger state’s increasing demands and bad behavior, driving them into the open arms of the U.S. and, increasingly, allied partners such as Japan and Australia.
Finally, there is no third, richest state of all, to fund Chinese growth as in the Athens-Sparta model. Russia can wield a certain amount of influence, of course, but if ever there was a world power on the decline, it is Russia, continuing its downward spiral since the heady days of Cold War parity with the U.S., albeit dressed then as the Soviet Union. Countries like Iran and North Korea might dream of funding such a feud amongst the two great powers, but both have more pressing issues at home and neither could, frankly, secure enough funds—or provide enough military power—to ever tip the scale one way or the other.
No, in the end result, if war comes between the U.S. and China it will not happen because the former is caught in a trap of Ancient Greek design. Rather, it is much more likely to break out as a result of some miscalculated Chinese attempt to “correct” as they would see it, the historical and political anomaly that is the Republic of China on Taiwan. This, I think, is more likely to happen as a result of a weakening China, not one on the rise, reflective of a final desperate shot at securing popular support for a decrepit and slowly failing—if outwardly optimistic—regime.
That this regime seems to be placing all its remaining eggs into the military basket, of course, is why academics concoct such predictive heuristics in the first place. But things are rarely so straight forward or simple as they seem. A fact as true today as it was 2,500 years ago.
M. G. Haynes