CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Sino-American Relations and the “Thucydides Trap”

Thucydides. This is the plaster cast bust currently in exposition of Zurab Tsereteli’s gallery in Moscow. Photograph Source: shakko – CC BY-SA 3.0

History doesn’t repeat itself, but there are relevant analogies in any discussion of historical events, and these can be helpful.  The current tensions in Sino-American relations are reminiscent of both the Peloponnesian rivalry and war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th-century B.C. (as recounted by the Athenian historian Thucydides) and the European rivalry between Germany and Britain in the years before World War I.

Harvard Professor Graham Allison wrote about the example of the Peloponnesian rivalry 11 years ago in a book titled “The Thucydides Trap.”  He argued that Sparta had established regional dominance, and that Athens’ efforts to contest that dominance led to a long war that was labeled the first “forever war.”  In the years before the outbreak of World War I, Britain had used its naval power to establish regional dominance, but Germany’s building up of its own military forces, particularly its naval forces, produced tensions that contributed to the start of the war in 1914.

No one predicted the horror and slaughter of WWI that left Europe in ruins and contributed to the end of the Russian, Ottoman, and the Austro-Hungarian empires.  Four years of war moved Europe from the political center of the global community to a weakened condition that opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and ultimately to fascism in Germany and Italy.  During a trip to the United States in 2015, Xi said........

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