US President Donald Trump has a new hobby: he reads the works of ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Does Donald Trump reads the original texts in original language? Nope. His advisers have compiled a Trump-friendly version of Thucydides Trap in simple English.
According to Politico, Trump’s new hobby emerged after the intervention of Harvard academic Graham Allison who .
At a meeting of the National Security Council, Allison briefed a group of staffers on one of history’s most studied conflicts—a brutal war waged nearly 2,500 years ago between Athens and rival Sparta.
Allison claimed the US could draw lessons from the ancient Athens-Sparta war when it comes to USA-China modern rivalry. Lessons to learn from the so-called Thucydides Trap.
The subject was America’s rivalry with China, cast through the lens of ancient Greece. The 77-year-old Allison is the author of a recent book based on the writings of Thucydides, the ancient historian famous for his epic chronicle of the Peloponnesian War between the Greek states of Athens and Sparta. Allison cites the Greek scholar’s summation of why the two powers fought: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” He warns that the same dynamic could drive this century’s rising empire, China, and the United States into a war neither wants. Allison calls this the “Thucydides Trap,” and it’s a question haunting some very important people in the Trump administration, particularly as Chinese officials arrive Wednesday for “diplomatic and security dialogue” talks between Washington and Beijing designed, in large part, to avoid conflict between the world’s two strongest nations.
In its long article “Why the White House is reading Greek history” Politico notes that The Trump team is obsessing over Thucydides, the ancient historian who wrote a seminal tract on war.
What is Thucydides Trap?
Thucydides wrote:
“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”
What he is saying is that a rising power (Athens) will come into conflict with an already dominant power (Sparta) as the two have diametrically opposing interests that make conflict an almost certainty.
The phrase ‘Thucydides Trap’ was coined by an American political scientist and Harvard professor, Graham T. Allison, to describe the phenomena of a rising power and an established dominant power almost always breaking into conflict. He took the term from the writings of Thucydides who was writing on the state of Greek affairs in The History of the Peloponnesian War which describes a series of wars between Athens and Sparta that changed the balance of power in Greece. Thucydides was commenting that the rise of Athens spawned fears in Sparta, an already established power who subsequently started to arm itself for war. Sparta would go on to win the war but at a tremendous cost that hurt it immensely and paved the way for new powers just 30 years late.
History writer Cameron Greene wrote in Quora
In the modern sense, the Thucydides’s Trap is used to describe relations between U.S. and China or the U.S. and Russia although the latter has fell out of use as the economic growth of Russia remains stagnant along with the U.S. turning towards China with the Asian Pivot.
While conflict is not expected in the traditional sense of the term, economic and social conflict will escalate as a result of China’s dramatic rise against the global hegemony of the United States. The U.S. cannot stand to have its economic or military dominance to be challenged in such a manner and conflict is almost axiomatic in the near future. This is the modern ‘Thucydides trap’.
Is the US heading to a war with China?
Beijing jumped in the Thucydides Trap and told Trump that these Trap-Trump games are dangerous.
by Beijing review
Official news agency Xinhua interviewed a Canadian scholar who warned of the risks.
“This (Thucydides’ trap) can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s dangerous because you start thinking that somehow this part of the concept has some analytical value,” Amitav Acharya, a notable Indian-born Canadian scholar on international relations and writer of the popular book “The End of American World Order,” told Xinhua.
The idea of Thucydides’ trap was “very simplistic and a little sensationalistic,” Acharya said, explaining that a trap basically means no other choices or an inevitable conflict.
Who is Thucydides?
Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of “scientific history” by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.
He has also been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by and constructed upon the emotions of fear and self-interest.
His text is still studied at both universities and military colleges worldwide. The Melian dialogue is regarded as a seminal work of international relations theory.
PS some mean people claim that the Trump team is preparing a Trump version on Thucydides Trap in a reading form the US president understands best: 140 characters of a Tweet. I suspect these mean people could be Greeks who hated to do Thucydides works in the high school classroom and had to spend hours, days, weeks and months trying to analyse not the semantics but the grammar, the syntax and the translation.
