What more is there to say about the Thucydides Trap? The issues with this as a reading of Thucydides and as a model for current US-China relations have been quite extensively discussed (see e.g. T. Greer’s excellent contribution to the current zenpundit.com Thucydides roundtable, or Seth Jaffe’s National Interest piece last year, if you’re sick of my frequent comments on this issue). And yet it keeps coming; as I’ve remarked before, any mention of tensions in the South China Seas prompts a flurry of re-tweeting of Graham Allison’s original article in The Atlantic, while this week the concept has been given a big push in another Atlantic article, this time by James Fallows on China’s ‘great leap backwards’ and the threat this poses to the USA, followed up by a blog post by Fallows in response to Trump’s cack-handed and provocative tweeting about the situation: “But if historians and citizens look back on our era as the transition point, at which 40 years of relatively successful management of U.S.-China relations gave way to a reckless focus on grievances and differences,tweets like the one today will be part of their sad record.”
What’s most striking about this latest intervention, which has been enthusiastically retweeted (with or without additional commentary like “Coming US-China war?” or “USA-CHINA – THEY CALL IT Thucydides trap – and the world must dance to the chinese drum with a gun against their heads – manipulation”) is the title: Remember the ‘Thucydides Trap’? The Chinese Do; Trump Clearly Does Not. To be fair to Fallows, this may be nothing at all to do with him, but it is the point that, to judge from the Twitter, many readers have latched onto, with calls for PEOTUS to be forcibly educated in Thucydides (or at least in the Trap) without a moment’s hesitation in order to avert WWIII.
I’m struck by the number of assumptions embedded in that headline, and in most of the subsequent discussion. Firstly, that the ‘Thucydides Trap’ is a real thing, an objective quality of the way the world works, rather than an IR theory (whether offered by Thucydides or Allison). Secondly, that it is a real thing in the present, specifically in relation to US-China relations. Thirdly, that the Chinese understand this (and even, by implication, that this knowledge is shaping their own policy) whereas the US is in danger of forgetting.
Well, the Chinese know about the Thucydides Trap BECAUSE U.S. POLITICIANS AND JOURNALISTS KEEP GOING ON ABOUT IT AND ASKING THEM TO COMMENT; insofar as it plays any part in their strategic thinking, I imagine, it’s on the basis that it’s a core element of American thinking so they’d better take account of it. The focus of their public pronouncements is on insisting that there is nothing inevitable in this situation, whereas the clear risk of the US adopting the model is that it may lead not to an exaggerated concern to reduce the risks of escalating conflict, as intended, but to acceptance that war is inevitable so better prepare for it. Yes, this could all be a Machiavellian deception, and they’re secretly ramping up to war readiness ‘cos Thucydides told them to while doing the Mars Attacks “we come in peace” thing – they’re using our own poorly-analysed classical reception against us! – but I find it hard to believe that this is really based on Thucydides.
It does seem increasingly clear that it would be rational to assume an unhealthy attachment to Thucydides on the part of at least some American commentators. Okay, as Greer remarked to me on the Twitter, with regard to my post about the increasing number of current and former military personnel looking back to antiquity, newspaper and magazine articles do this sort of casual reference to a current soc sci theory as a starting point for their argument all the time; this is just evidence for Allison’s success in turning his theory into a social media meme (which is interesting in itself, and at some point I do need to study its spread in more detail and correlate this with my ‘Thucydides is a virus turning people into zombies’ theory; presumably one can chart infection vectors on social media?).
What strikes me, compared with similar break-out theories – I immediately think of Fukuyama’s End of History or Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations – is the lack of push-back, at least so far. Both those essays were highly influential, but also immediately criticised – you couldn’t escape the fact that these provoked debate, that for every commentator claiming that one or other of them had Explained the Current State of the World there was another roundly denouncing the whole enterprise – whereas debate around the ‘Thucydides Trap’, leaving aside my lonely plodding academic pedantry, seems to focus almost entirely on whether it’s unavoidable or not. As I said above, the existence of the Trap is taken for granted; it’s just a question of the details of its mechanism.
My starting assumption is that this is largely a function of Allison attributing his theory to Thucydides, at the cost of a certain amount of his own glory: the ‘Thucydides Trap’ thus becomes something that has always been true, and has been known for two and a half thousand years, so there’s not much point in arguing about the basic outline, as opposed to a time-bound theory developed to interpret the specific situation of the present which is therefore open to extensive debate (this might indeed be a basis for an interesting comparison of the reception of Fukuyama’s essay, in brief ‘this is where we are now’, and Huntington’s ‘we are where we have always been even if not previously recognised’). Belief in Thucydides as ultimate authority figure? Willingness to give credit for timeless insights to an ancient Greek but not to a living academic?
Sphinx 
I went back to read the original Graham Allison article. His 16 cases come down to two observations: 1) Over history, great power readjustments have tended to be accomplished via direct war between the powers; 2) Since the advent of nuclear weapons, great power adjustments have NOT tended to be accomplished by direct war between the powers. Oddly enough, Allison’s article does not contain the word “nuclear” and does not really remark upon this notable difference between ‘ancient’ and recent history. Whatever his theory is, it does not seem to account for the evidence.
Also unremarked is the possibility of disagreeing with Thucydides and viewing the war he chronicled not as “inevitable” but contingent. it might have proceeded or turned out differently; it might not have happened at all, at least in the sense that key decisions by key actors might have allowed that particular conflict to be managed better and with less systemic impact.
No doubt Thucydides brought important observations about the behavior of powers and rulers and important new insights into the logic of escalation to his conclusion regarding “inevitability”. i wouldn’t recommend ignoring him. War is chronic in our time, as in his; leaders take uniformed or emotion-driven decisions, now as then. But great power wars have not been a feature of the last 70 years. Why is that?
Yes, the failure even to mention the nuclear issue is quite remarkable. Some of his attempts at turning complex multipolar conflicts into simple case of established power versus rising power are also somewhat, erm, imaginative. On top of that, it’s arguable whether Thucydides did actually think the war was literally inevitable – it depends on how you translate a very tricky sentence – and, as you say, even if he did, we don’t need to believe that. And yet the meme persists and thrives…
I was wondering about the translation. Can’t judge myself, though. Thucydides is quite beyond my mostly-forgotten New Testament Greek.
Great post, BTW.
Thucydides’ Greek gives everyone a headache; I take the line that it’s deliberately difficult, so that arguing about what the hell he’s on about is part of the learning experience. If you haven’t seen it, there’s quite a good discussion of the question of whether T thinks war is inevitable in the Greer piece linked to above (http://zenpundit.com/?p=53502) and the comments below. There’s definitely play with the idea of compulsion – but much less clear, I think, whether Spartans are compelled to war by the situation (which would tend towards the “war was inevitable” reading) or by their own perception of the situation (which might mean that *this* war was effectively inevitable, but also indicates that things could have been different).
So we have the rudiments of a new theory of why Thucydides was exiled: Some Athenian chief-of-staff concluded, “We can’t understand this guy; let’s get rid of him.”
Will check out the link, thanks.
At any rate it can’t have helped when he was trying to explain his failure as Amphipolis.
“Well, the Chinese know about the Thucydides Trap BECAUSE U.S. POLITICIANS AND JOURNALISTS KEEP GOING ON ABOUT IT AND ASKING THEM TO COMMENT.”
Perhaps I could provide some, albeit very personal, perspective on how Chinese view the so-called Thucydides Trap. When I was a college student almost 15 years ago, I took an elective course on international relations. One of the books that we read in class was Understanding International Conflicts by Joseph Nye. I recall, though rather vaguely, that we discussed in class on the imminent conflicts between a rising power and an established power, the danger of self-fulfilling prophecy, etc. I thought the so-called Thucydides Trap, when it went viral in social media, was merely a rebranding of this line of thinking exposed by Joseph Nye. I therefore would say that we (Chinese) know about the Trap before Allison came up with it.
As for the “unhealthy attachment” to Thucydides, I recall Joseph Nye wrote, in the same book, that perhaps IR scholars should stop reading the History of the Peloponnesian War, which I find rather amusing today.
Aha, 30 seconds of Googling leads me to the article Joseph Nye referred to:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20097856?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Many thanks for this; as I don’t have a word of Mandarin, I’m completely dependent on this sort of report to have any idea of what’s going on on the Chinese side. I think (and I’m certainly not the first person to have remarked on this) that the ‘Thucydides Trap’ is largely if not entirely a rehash of power transition theory, which dates back to the 1950s – Allison’s achievement is to present it in allegedly historical terms and to do an excellent marketing job by drawing on the authority and recognition factor of Thucydides.
One thing that interests me – and maybe you can answer this – is how far Chinese IR students read texts like Nye as giving insight into how the world works, and how far as evidence of how Americans think the world works – in other words, how far do they become orthodox IR realists or the like, rather than putting a distinctive spin on this? And this ties to an issue I’ve been wondering about for even longer, namely how far Chinese academics make sense of the processes of modernisation and globalisation by drawing on their own traditions of e.g. historiography (as C19 theorists looked back to the classical tradition) and how far they simply adopt conventional western theories.
Yes, the Walsh article is good – though he still ends up recommending a better reading of Thucydides, rather than ditching Thucydides altogether.
Again, I cannot speak of IR studies in China beyond my very limited experience. In the elective course that I took, I recall that we mostly discussed the ideas of Morgenthau, Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Fukuyama, Huntington, etc. While the professor touched on a variety of (conflicting) ideas, which befitted an introductory course, I tend to say that American IR theorists most certainly dominated the classroom. As I didn’t major in IR studies (I majored in physics), it is impossible for me to say what was being discussed in more advanced courses. I doubt that Chinese IR scholars would draw much from the classical tradition as it was largely sinocentric. But I could be completely wrong.