Thucydides Was Wrong

 

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Russia has reputedly blown up a rail line in Poland. The governments of Germany and Poland are reputedly expecting war with Russia by at least 2029. Now they are saying maybe next year. All the EU NATO members are rapidly boosting their defense budgets.

I have thought it improbable that Russia would do anything to provoke NATO to war. After all, if they can’t take Ukraine, how do they think they would fare against 32 more enemies at once?

But perhaps I was wrong. History tells us nations do not always act in their best interests. Even if we can explain Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, why did he declare war on the USA in 1941? Why did smaller Japan bomb Pearl Harbor? Both look like suicidal acts. 

It is currently popular to talk of Thucydides’s Trap as the likely cause of the next war. Russia attacking NATO does not fit into this mold. The idea is that wars start because an emerging power wants to knock an established power off their throne. Russia is no emerging power. It might have been in 1914. It is in decline. Historically, however, Thucydides’s Trap, if it is real, is far from the only cause of war. Wars start instead when some established power is dying. It is then prone to make some desperate lunge, like the thrashing about of a dying animal. Might as well use its power while it still has some!

Consider the First World War. It was begun, suicidally, by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An empire once mighty, but on the verge of collapse. As was the Ottoman Empire, their ally. These were hardly emerging powers; nor currently dominant powers.

What about World War Two? Germany was now similarly on the downward slope. After a brilliant run in the later 19th and early 20th century, it had been knocked back hard in the First World War. Hitler’s supposed economic miracle in Germany was a Ponzi scheme. His only hope to avoid collapse was to invade nearby countries and seize their assets. The whole thing was a desperate lunge as a result of the first war.

Japan, similarly, attacked Pearl Harbor as they were effectively losing their war of attrition in China. It was a last mad throw of the dice.

One could see the Napoleonic Wars as a similar desperate rear-guard action. France had been the dominant power in Europe and arguably around the globe until they lost the relatively low-intensity Seven Years’ War to Britain. That one might be down to Thucydides. But the American Revolution, bankruptcy, the French Revolution, and Napoleon all followed—France trying to re-establish its grandeur. Much bigger conflicts.

In other words, nations are most dangerous as they start to topple, and become desperate.

There are many signs Russia and the Putin regime are in danger of falling apart. Russia has certainly been in decline since losing the Cold War. At some point, what does Putin have to lose? It looks better, as perhaps Hitler reckoned in declaring war on the US, or Japan at Peal Harbor, to lose to what is obviously a greater force, that to lose, humiliatingly, to a smaller adversary like Ukraine. 

Worse, there are similar rumours of China and Xi being on the brink of collapse. They too might lash out. There are rumours of Iran and the mullahs being on the brink of collapse.

The conditions might actually be ripe for a Third World War.