Category: Blog Post

Everyone—pundits and professors alike—seems to be talking about the Thucydides Trap, the supposed ancient geopolitical principle that “when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the most likely outcome is war.” Most recently applied to China and the United States, this maxim allegedly predicts a military conflict between these two global super-powers.

But this so-called Thucydides Trap relies on an ancient text to concoct some near-infallible prophecy, and it misses that the Athenian historian himself was engaged in something closer to psychological speculation.

The theory’s principal evangelist is Graham Allison of Harvard Kennedy School, whose new book, Destined for War, takes a quasi-scientific view of history’s “Thucydides Traps” and concludes that “twelve of 16 cases … in the past 500 years ended violently.” (Allison has written about this theory in other outlets, too.) Some authors have pushed back against this formulaic view of historical events and propose that international conflict has more to do with irrational, even unpredictable action than with models of geopolitical power. Leon Whyte argues that “the true trap is countries going into, and continuing, war clouded by passions like fear, hubris and honor.” In a 2015 essay, to his credit, Allison himself explains how war “is not inevitable” but that “escaping the Trap requires tremendous effort.”

At least one academic reviewer sees problems in Allison’s assessment of China as Allison’s theory might apply to this country as a historically peculiar case. In his review, Arthur Waldron explains that much of the tension between the two countries arises not out of some Thucydidean conflict but out of “the pervasive lack of knowledge of China — a country which is, after all, run by the Communist Party, the police, and the army, and thus difficult to get to know. This black hole of information has perversely created an overabundance of fantasies, some very pessimistic.”

As a classicist, I’m of course interested in looking to the original text of Thucydides to see how he formulates this principle, and W. Robert Connor has already done a good job laying out some of the interpretive problems in the Greek. He pays close attention to Thucydides’ claim of “the growth of the Athenian power, which putting the Lacedaemonians into fear necessitated the war” (Hobbes). The verb here, “necessitated” (anagkasai), has “a wide range of meaning, from exert psychological pressure on someone, to apply physical force. It’s related to words for the drives for food, sex, etc., that are part of the Greeks’ understanding human nature. It’s the right word to choose when exploring the powerful, but not unavoidable effects of fear in human affairs.” It’s a reading that emphasizes the psychology of competing parties, rather than immutable laws of international conflict. At least one commentary, too, reads Thucycdides here as an account of incentives and desires:

The main cause of the war was Athenian imperialism and Spartan fear of her rival’ for Athens only ‘became great’ through her empire. That is, the Athenians were the provocative cause; the Spartans were, however, animated by fear lest their own position should be weakened, not by any unselfish desire to defend the principle of autonomy.
Gomme, Commentary on Thucydides I.152

Pundits and students are sometimes eager to quote ancient texts as though these authors understood unchanging truths about human nature or laws of history. But in the robust and adversarial intellectual culture of Classical Athens, authors like Plato, Sophocles, and Thucydides were seeking consistent and coherent views of history and philosophy in the face of intractable and even incomprehensible problems. Sometimes these authors are convincing, sometimes not. In either case, we shouldn’t imagine that these theorists and thinkers, wading through their own messy politics, discovered some timeless and tidy rule of international relations that applies neatly to the complexities of our century.

I have a brief essay in today’s Washington Post drawing out the disconnect between the current administration’s call for “the desire and the courage to preserve” Western traditions and its eagerness to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities, a major catalyst for scholarship that does exactly that. As one of the lexicographers at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, I argue that “defunding the NEH threatens to pull the nation out of the world’s collective effort to define — literally — Western history.”

Here are the two key paragraphs about today’s political hostility toward humanities scholarship, but do go over to the Post to read the whole text:

Sometimes it feels like we lexicographers are piling together a medieval cathedral, one that is centuries in the making and that no single generation — and indeed, no single country — can call its own. And perhaps this metaphor hints at an unfortunate reason for renewed political hostility to work like ours. Many politicians today do not look to a timeless cathedral as a guiding architectural analogue for their statesmanship. Instead of constructing a Burkean civil society of intergenerational effort, they now see their ideals reflected in a glitzy skyscraper on Fifth Avenue: a monument to a real estate developer whose megalomaniacal impulsiveness brings to mind certain Roman predecessors, and not good ones.

My hunch, in other words, is that Trumpists are not eager to eliminate the NEH and to undercut international scholarship out of genuine concerns about government spending or even a principled, radical isolationism. Instead, my job is newly imperiled because my research is not fast-paced and exciting. TLL entries are much longer than a tweet, more tedious than a campaign rally. When our president’s family history is told through gaudy hotels and neon-saturated casinos, and when his policy positions center on a hyperbolic “big, beautiful wall” and tales of urban violence worthy of dystopian action films, it should surprise no one that his administration is racing to cut its support, small as it already is, of the quiet study of old books.