Thucydides, Shut Your Trap

 

It is fashionable these days to warn of Thucydides’ trap: that when a hegemonic power is threatened by a rising power, war usually ensues. This is especially supposed to predict an inevitable clash between the US and China.

One can be more specific: the existing hegemon will try to knock out the rising power. The US will declare war on China. For it makes no sense for the rising power to initiate hostilities: their situation is improving and their hegemony inevitable so long as nothing rocks the boat. This was the case for Thucydides’ own example, the Peloponnesian War: started by Sparta, he maintained, to check the rising power of Athens.

But the model does not fit the facts; it is actually hard to find modern examples. The current Gaza affair was started by Hamas, far from the regional hegemon. Russia did not attack Ukraine because Ukraine was on the verge of supplanting it as the regional power.

Conversely, Britain and the US did not go to war as world hegemony passed from the one to the other. It was all managed on fairly good terms.

Hegemonic powers do not generally fight hard to save their hegemony. Instead, hegemonies decline from within, experiencing a growing lack of commitment, not wanting the burden of being responsible for everything. Witness the British Empire. Witness the Soviet Union. They greet the end with a sense of relief. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Who fought hardest to preserve their overseas dominions? Portugal. The poorest and weakest of European powers.

In the real world of history, war seems most likely when a relatively minor, second-tier power is facing possible collapse, as a means of perhaps restoring its viability.

This makes sense: if your power is in obvious decline, and soon to go altogether, you want to use it before you lose it.

Hamas fits this model. The Palestinian cause was in obvious jeopardy due to the Abrahamic accords. The intifada had lost the backing of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states—all the obvious allies. Peace between Israel and the Arabs was spreading, leaving the Palestinians stranded. So their desperate attack.

Witness Russia in Ukraine. Russia’s population is shrinking. The economy has been held together by oil, but fracking and the move away from carbon-based fuels made the future look dim. 

Iraq invaded Kuwait because Saddam was in dire economic trouble. He owed Kuwait money, and he  tried to seize the Kuwaiti oil fields.

Graham Allison cites World War I as an example of Thucydides’ trap: the UK wanted to knock back rising Germany. Yet this does not fit the facts: the war was started by Austria-Hungary, the weakest of the major participants, and the UK was late and reluctant in. Austria-Hungary was on the verge of collapse; it had the least to lose on a roll of the dice.

I believe Hitler started the Second World War because the Nazi economic programme was a Ponzi scheme. In fact, Hitler said so, to his associates, as he invaded Poland. If he couldn’t grab the assets, land, and industry of Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then the Soviet Union, the whole thing would come down like a house of cards. As in the end it did.

Argentina invaded the Falklands when the regime risked imminent collapse. On the same principle, bankrupt Venezuela is now rattling sabres towards Guyana.

Militant Islamism has become a major factor recently not because Islam has become more dominant or intellectually vital in Muslim lands—but because growing exposure to Western ideas has threatened it.

The optimistic lesson from this is that whoever disturbs the peace is likely to lose the war. The bad news is, the next war is likely to come from some relatively unexpected quarter, not the adversary everyone has their eyes on.