Reading Thucydides in the wolf world

The term Thucydides’s Trap has caught on since Professor Graham Allison wrote his 2017 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

The core concept comes from Greek soldier-historian Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War who identifies the structural stress that occurs when a major rising power is perceived to threaten to displace an established power.

My intention here is not to explain Allison’s work or his treatment of the trap but to point to how modern-day scholars and policymakers cherrypick episodes from Thucydides’s work to justify their own approaches. I believe, as the post-World War II international security architecture unravels and we enter what some describe as the wolf world, that it is important to analyse Thucydides’s history in view of the book’s hermeneutics rather than picking up episodes that suit one’s own predilections.

Thucydides arrived in the United States policy corridors with Dr Henry Kissinger. He had taught the text at Harvard and was keenly familiar with it. But upon joining Richard Nixon’s administration in the White House, he sought fit to focus on the Melian Dialogue, colouring outside the lines. The one line, “The strong exact what they can; the weak concede what they must,” became the slogan of Cold War strategies.

Kissinger knew that Thucydides message was far more nuanced and he was not justifying imperial overreach. But that was for the classroom. The world Kissinger had to tackle was one in which........

© Dawn Prism