Sphinx

What can Thucydides tell us about the current state of global politics and the likely direction of future developments? As I’m writing a book for Princeton UP called What Thucydides Knew, it does suit me very well that people keep asking this question – even if they then keep offering the same tedious answers. I struggle to see, for example, what contribution this morning’s op ed in the New York Times makes to our understanding of anything, beyond the fact that it’s a Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army trotting out boilerplate Thucydides Trap stuff about tensions in the South China Sea, rather than one of the usual suspects.

It’s a bonus, therefore, when someone offers a new and potentially interesting take on the question, even if I disagree with a lot of it.* In their recent article in Foreign Affairs, ‘The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire’, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman develop the parallel between the United States’ weaponisation of its dominant position within global financial systems, such as threatening to freeze Iraq’s accounts at the Federal Reserve or exerting control over the dollar clearing system to coerce financial institutions into acting as its proxies, and Athens’ actions within the Delian League, above all the transfer of the League’s treasury to Athens where it was used solely for Athenian benefit. Contrary to either the IR Realists or the Thucydides Trap crowd, they argue, what Thucydides’ account shows us is that the greatest risk facing the United States is the hubris and temptation to abuse one’s position that comes with imperial dominance: “Athens’s decision to turn a common treasury into a system of tribute and subjugation alienated its former allies and precipitated its fall from power. The United States may be starting to recapitulate this dismal history.”

I’m old enough to have felt a certain amount of deja vu on reading this: the idea that Thucydides warns against imperial overreach was widely canvassed twenty-odd years ago, in response to the Thucydides-loving Neoconservatives’ “we’re an empire now, and we create our own reality” take. But of course that was focused on the exercise of actual imperial force, launching of over-confident overseas military expeditions etc., whereas the distinctive claim of Farrell and Newman is that we need to understand current events in terms of ‘weaponized interdependence’ (International Security 44.1 (2019)), the coercive manipulation of globalised networks by those who occupy dominant positions within them. Far from reducing or removing international conflict, as the more optimistic cheerleaders for globalisation proclaimed, a networked, integrated world simply creates new weapons and new fields of struggle.

My initial thought, in deciding to scribble something on this topic, was that it would be interesting to explore in a bit more detail whether this ‘weaponized interdependence’ could be usefully applied to classical Greece. However, everything in Farrell and Newman’s substantive article emphasises its irrelevance to ancient history; their focus is on the networks of international finance and electronic communication, on the SWIFT payment system and the control of internet protocols, on institutions developed to generate market efficiencies and reduce transaction costs. None of these have the faintest analogues in a period when, if we can talk of ‘globalisation’ at all, it’s about growing consciousness of the wider world, not any sort of time-space compression through developing technology. The hubs and choke-points of ancient networks were entirely, rather than only partially, located in physical space. Perhaps there is more mileage for the idea in the rather more integrated Hellenistic or Roman worlds, which did see the substantial development of systems of law and exchange that transcended regional boundaries…

The one thing which looked as if it could conceivably be relevant is the mid-5th century standards decree (aka the coinage decree), whereby members of the Delian League were required to adopt Athenian weights and measures and use Athenian silver coinage, which perhaps worked to the benefit of Athenian traders and certainly gave Athens some control on the flow and availability of coined money. But this also emphasises the differences once again; whereas F&N focus on institutions that were designed and legitimised, at least ostensibly, as measures for the benefit of all, but which have subsequently been manipulated by dominant players as a new form of imperialism, the standards decree was from the beginning a product of already-existing imperial control, and never seen as anything different. Not so much weaponized interdependence, in other words, but interdependence at spearpoint (as, of course, was so much of the economic integration of the Roman Empire).

Does this matter? Insofar as F&N’s argument in the Foreign Affairs piece is that, as an imperial power within the global finance system, the USA will be tempted to abuse its dominance and the example of Athens shows this won’t end well, then no: it doesn’t matter that the Delian League was more like NATO than SWIFT, where the point at issue is the tendency of power to breed hubris, especially in the hands of reckless demagogues.

The problem is that they seem to be using Thucydides to make a different initial point, before exploring the hubris theme: to imply that the Delian League was like the international payments system, and so Athens’ abuse of its position is a strong analogue to US behaviour; hence, whatever it might claim or even think, it makes sense to think of the US as an imperial power, and hence Thucydides’ warnings about the consequences of imperialism come into force.

In turning financial relationships into a tool of empire, the United States follows in the footsteps of ancient Athens. The experience of this predecessor does not augur well for Washington. Athens used its financial power to abuse its allies and in doing so precipitated its own ruination. The United States risks doing the same…

Like Athens, the United States and its allies have created a shared treasury of sorts: the global financial system and the complex institutional arrangements that underpin it… And like Athens in the Delian League, the United States has been the first among equals, reaping enormous benefits from its central role in global finance and from the supremacy of the dollar…

Powerful states can build extraordinary collective goods that benefit their allies and themselves: a jointly funded defense league in the eastern Mediterranean, in Athens’s case, or the vast network of relationships that underpins the U.S.-led global financial system today…

This is all the wrong way round. Athens turned its political and military superiority into a source of financial advantage, not vice versa. Yes, the Delian League in its original incarnation can be seen as a collective good; but the transfer of its treasury to Athens was a manifestation of Athenian dominance, a key example of the abuse of its power, not the creation of a means by which it would then be able to establish dominance and abuse it. Inter-state financial relationships in the fifth-century Aegean are a product, rather than a tool, of empire.**

This still doesn’t matter very much, except to historical pedants like me – and mainly as further evidence of the rhetorical role of Thucydides references in International Relations and Political Science. The Foreign Affairs article seems to be grounded in the assumption that dressing a perfectly cogent argument up in a Thucydides costume will make it more persuasive and accessible to a wider readership; that enough people are primed to think of current geopolitics in Thucydidean terms (even if this is a return to the America = Athens view of the Cold War or the Neocons, rather than the America = Established Power = Sparta perspective that’s been more dominant recently) that their view of the United States can be influenced by offering a different account of Athenian behaviour.

Of course, it’s probably relevant that the usual “we’re not Athens, we’re Sparta” response has absolutely no purchase in this context, given that the Spartans didn’t have money at all…

*Possibly unnecessary declaration of interest: I’ve written a couple of things in the past on Henry Farrell’s invitation, and he was kind enough not only to cite me in this article, but to tag me in on the Twitter…

14. As would the tendency of a democratic imperial power to elect dubious demagogues, who then try to squeeze allies for all that it can. Finis (all this with apologies to @NevilleMorley – at least this provides him with another dubious IR use of Thucydides to roundly deplore)

— Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) January 24, 2020

** This isn’t a universal principle: the obvious exception would be the Megaran Decree, whereby Athens excluded Megaran citizens from all the markets of the Delian League – and while Thucydides notoriously says very little about it, it’s clear from e.g. Aristophanes that this was widely seen as a significant source of Spartan hostility. But this looks very much a like a direct sanction, which F&N expressly exclude from their analysis of weaponized interdependence.