Is the world spiralling down towards Thucydides Trap?
Trump’s erratic and transactional policies have seriously harmed US relations with long-standing allies and even foes, showing how distant the president is to temperate counsel. Now, much depends on the temperance of China’s leadership, which is in the early stages of getting to grips with the implications of its emergence as a new and major force
So is this what the gates to the slippery slope down into the Thucydides Trap look like? Is this a deathly mix of hubris, fear and honour dragging us down into a hegemonic war?
As Donald Trump’s hyperactive team hurtle from G7 belligerence in Paris, to Pacific Ocean defence talks, and a likely summit with North Korea’s Kim Jung-un in Singapore, to mercantilist trade battles in Beijing and snarling unfinished business in Nafta, it is time to pause and think afresh about Thucydides’ story.
It was Graham Allison at the Harvard Kennedy School that reminded us of the immediate danger of a Thucydides Trap – the rise of Athens and the fear this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.
It is worth looking closer at the story leading into the Peloponnesian War. Archidamus, king of Sparta, seemed keenly aware of the trap: “We must not be hurried into deciding in a day’s brief space a question which concerns many lives and fortunes and many cities, and in which honour is deeply involved. We must decide calmly.” One must pause, and wonder whether Archidamus was not pleading directly into Trump’s ear.
He was flatly contradicted by Sthenelaidas, one of his five magistrates: “Vote, Spartans, for war as the honour of Sparta demands.” Sthenelaidas won the argument and 27 years of war followed. So say Bolton, Navarro, Lighthizer, and one wonders whether 27 years of war is set to follow without history’s lessons being learned.