Thucydides' Trap

Most people have a misconception about historians in general. They think that historians are people who remember the names of people who are dead for decades if not centuries as if they are their best friends, or about dates in the past as if it’s their birthday or talk about events long gone and buried in sand as if they were there to personally witness it. Can’t blame them because that is what most people came to know about history. Dates, events, names of great personality, the very things that they tried in vain to memorize and remember in their high school history exam. History however is more than just names, events, and dates. History is about the past, or more apt, the logic of what happened and why it happened in the past. Believe it or not, the more you study history, the more you’ll discover that history follows a pattern, a recurring pattern. The old adage that “history repeats itself” is quite true. And nothing rings truer than the concept of a “Thucydides’ Trap”, a term coined by Graham Allison of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015. Thucydides from which the trap was named was an Athenian general and a noted historian during the Peloponnesian War (some 2,400 years ago) and after the defeat of Athens, he wrote a book, “History on the Peloponnesian War”. At the conclusion of his seminal work, Thucydides concludes “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired Sparta, that made this war inevitable.” It is from this conclusion that Graham Allison formulated his Thucydides trap, “when a rising power challenges a ruling power, war inevitably ensued and would end badly for both”. He further reinforces his thesis by analyzing events of the past 500 years mostly in Europe with one Asian case, that of the 16 cases of Thucydides trap, 12 resulted in war. In 4 cases, war was avoided. Graham Allison developed this thesis not out of some academic boredom but to analyze the present relationship of China (the rising power) and the US (the ruling power). To him, the Sino – US conundrum fits the bill of a Thucydides trap and to quote Graham, “when a rising power’s growing clout resulted into growing entitlement, sense of it’s importance, and demand for greater say and sway which in turn, engenders the ruling power’s fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo”, a fact that is in full display right now. And to Graham, the current path of the Sino – US friction would more likely to lead to conflict, war and bloodshed but this is not inescapable provided that “cooler heads” prevail and that people heeds the lessons of history.

To read more about Graham Allison’s work try this page, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/thucydides-trap-are-us-and-china-headed-war