Thucydides Missed the Real Trap

Thucydides

“Thucydides’ Trap” is not real. This is the thesis that an established power will generally go to war with a rising power that is on course to overtake it. History does not bear this out.

What history does bear out is that a power or government in decline will lash out as a last resort, a roll of the dice. For what then do they have to lose? It was declining and fracturing Austria-Hungary who forced the world into the First World War. It was a once-whipped Germany that started the Second, as the Nazi economic miracle was about to collapse. It was a Ponzi scheme, and Hitler told his generals that unless they could plunder Poland, they were going to face economic ruin. Similarly, Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in desperation, cut off from oil and about to see their forces in China collapse. Juntas in Argentina and Greece risked reckless foreign invasions, of the Falklands and of Cyprus, to forestall their collapse.

Islam has been troublesome in recent decades for the same reason: it faced collapse in the face of Christian success and the spread of secularism through improved communications.

Unfortunately, we are in such a situation. Putin in Russia looks desperate. China faces grave demographic decline. They are liable to calculate that they must use whatever power they have now, bad as that gamble might be, or lose it forever.

We are at a moment of great danger.