Several hot-button issues were on agenda for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the United States: cyber security, nuclear policy, and climate change, to name a few. An Ancient Greek academic would seem to have no place at a table set with such 21st-century issues.
Yet, the fourth-century BCE historian Thucydides holds relevance in the context of current U.S.-China relations. Thucydides wrote the definitive history of the Peloponnesian War, a 20-year military conflict between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 BCE.
Here’s his framework: Sparta was an established power in control of the Peloponnesian League, while Athens was quickly rising in the Greek world order. Athens opportunistically expanded its territory into Persia, where the recent Persian War had created a gulf of governance. While Sparta dealt with conflicts within its borders, Athens also increased its economic position in the Mediterranean, demanding more tributes from its allies and imposing sanctions on Potidaea, an ally of the Peloponnesian League. Both powers thus caught themselves in rising tensions, as Athens encroached on Spartan spheres of control. Thucydides wrote, “The Athenians made their empire more and more strong, and greatly added to their own power at home. [The Spartans] for most of the time remained inactive…and also [were] prevented from taking action by wars in their own territory.”
Sparta eventually declared war, aiming to strike before Athens grew even stronger. Thucydides thus attributes the war to “the growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta.” The established power’s fear and overextension and the rising power’s ambition rendered the two parties vulnerable to conflict.
Sound familiar? Harvard Kennedy School professor Graham Allison thinks so. Referencing the historical model as “The Thucydides Trap,” Allison recently published an analysis of the 16 most recent international conflicts between an established power and a rising one, dating back to the 1600s. Included in the list are tensions between Germany and Britain before World War I as well as Soviet-American relations during the Cold War. 12 of these Thucydian conflicts resulted in war, while four remained peaceful.
According to Allison, the United States and China may be setting their own Thucydides trap. He draws a parallel between Chinese and Athenian expansion and compares the United States’ and Sparta’s fear and overextension. Allison uses the historical record to argue in The Atlantic that the potential for violent conflict between the United States and China is greater than many people believe. In the context of Allison’s assertions, President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the United States deserves to be examined with the Thucydides framework in mind. While there are definitely broad similarities between the United States-China and Sparta-Athens dynamic, several key differences decrease the likelihood of violent conflict.
The Players
There are salient similarities between the Greek dynamic and the modern one: a democratic power versus a tightly centralized one, and a society founded on free speech versus one reliant on governmental control.
It’s also true that China is expanding at unprecedented rates, economically and globally, justifying parallels to the rapid expansion of Athens. Singapore’s late president Lee Kwan Yew foreshadowed the country’s growth in 1994, stating, “It is not possible to pretend that [China] is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.” The Congressional Research Service released a report last month that stating that from 1979-2014, “on average, China [was] able to double the size of its economy in real terms every eight years.” The communist power is expected to displace the United States as the world’s largest economy. The International Monetary Fund predicts that in terms of purchasing power parity, China’s GDP will be 21.9 percent larger than the United States’ in 2019. And if current rates of growth continue, the nation may also reach military parity with the United States by the 2030s.
Some comparisons between Sparta and the United States are also valid, especially in relation to Athenian and Chinese military movement. America boasts the same relative military strength as the Spartan army, which was widely considered to be the strongest land army in Ancient Greece. The Council of Foreign Relations summarizes the discussion about U.S. naval freedom in China’s exclusive economic zone, attributing tensions to “rising apprehensions about the growth of China’s military power and its regional intentions.”
The CFR more recently published an analysis of increased Chinese economic and military investment and involvement in the South China Sea, paralleling Athens’ increase in movement near the Peloponnese before the outbreak of war. The institute has suggested the use of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on China if it continues such behavior.
If China and the United States could not simultaneously possess power, and if the two countries were diplomatically unengaged, these factors would perhaps point in the direction of violent conflict. However, Xi Jinping’s recent visit suggests that both parties are invested enough in each other to steer clear of the trap.
Diplomacy, Not War
Xi Jinping’s September visit to the United States was the third meeting between the Chinese and U.S. leadership within two years. His visit underscores China’s awareness of its increasing priority on the U.S. foreign policy agenda but also its attention to diplomacy.
According to Allison, the Thucydides Trap’s formation depends on two factors: “the rising power [China]’s growing entitlement, sense of its own importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power [United States] on the other.”
Allison’s conclusion of probable war is suspect, however, because not all of these characteristics apply to current U.S.-China relations. Though gross parallels can be drawn between the two pairs of countries, there are increasingly fundamental differences between Athens-Sparta and modern geopolitics. Including the Cold War, the last three pairs of countries that mirrored the Athens-Sparta dynamic avoided direct conflict, indicating that global powers increasingly favor diplomacy over warfare.
In particular, the phrase “determination to defend the status quo” strays too far from reality. President Obama’s speech after his working dinner with Xi Jinping highlights the seemingly sincere intention for both parties to grow in peace: “the United States welcomes the rise of a China that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and a responsible player in global affairs.” The higher rate of sincere diplomatic discourse is indicative of both parties’ intentions to cooperate. In contrast, classicist and former Dean of Yale College Donald Kagan characterized Spartan-Athenian diplomacy as full of “exorbitant” demands that served “merely [as] attempts to gain a favorable moral position in the war to come.”
Globalization has greased the wheels of diplomacy as well. The United States today is simply more in step with China than Sparta was with Athens. The United States imported nearly $270 billion worth of goods from China between January and July of this year and exported about $65 billion. Sparta maintained a relatively isolationist economic policy and did not interact extensively with Athens or its allies. Both the United States and China have much to lose from a falling out: the American economy is increasingly dependent on Chinese labor and product markets, and China has an increasing stake in the success of the United States due to a rapidly rising trade deficit.
In fact, China’s awareness of its rising power and the United States’s fear of that ascent may actually allow for more stable short-term diplomacy. As Xi Jinping declared in a speech in Seattle last month, there is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.” By stating his awareness of the trap, the Chinese president established a diplomatic and cooperative tone that he maintained throughout his visit.
During the visit, the cooperative spirit partially motivated by the awareness of Thucydides’ shadow manifested in concrete policy advances—commitments to address climate change, cyber security, and Iranian and North Korean nuclear policy.
Yet although outright military conflict is unlikely, the Thucydides model’s ability to explain the current U.S.-China dynamic cannot be completely dismissed. In Thucydides’ History, the content of speeches delivered by Spartan and Athenian leaders often sharply diverged from actual military decisions. Similarly, today’s superpowers often act outside the bounds established by diplomatic agreements.
Take the example of cyber security, which has received repeated attention in recent years. In 2013, Xi Jinping and Obama established a plan to create more rigorous cyber security regulations. However, the Chinese government has emerged as the primary suspect in a recent large-scale breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management that compromised the personal information of millions of federal employees. The issue was revisited during the heads of state’s recent meeting with stronger rhetoric. The White House stated, “neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property…with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors.”
The key to avoiding conflict moving forward, therefore, will be for China to grow with transparency about its economic and military intentions and for the United States to respect that growth. If the two countries can continue to nurture their diplomatic bond with Thucydides’ warnings in mind, they can avoid missteps of mythic proportions.
Image source: Wikimedia // The White House