Thucydides' Trap Nonsense

Ischinger (A German Senior Strategist in Der Spiegel): China, of course, represents a significant future challenge. The question for us must be: What contribution must we make to ensure that China's rise does not result in military conflict? That is the global political challenge. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides once said that war is unavoidable when an established power is challenged by a new power. In his era, it was Sparta and Athens. The challenge for us is to avoid stumbling into that trap.

It happens that I had studied the Peloponnesian War for years and Thucydides never mentioned a trap. He studied the causes of the war and said that the conservative, provincial Laconians, whose food was provided by Messenian subjects and their safety was based on an orderly system of alliances, were afraid of the disordered, mob-ruled, crazy, destabilizing, revolutionary city of Athens. One day the Athenian demos decided - against all advice - sail and attack the island of Sicily, peopled by Greek colonists. The crazy expedition failed and almost no one returned home. The Spartans feared that the Athenians, fueled by revolutionary ideas, would infect the Messenians and other subject peoples, and decided to impose order in Hellas.

It reminds me of revolutionary France, full of effervescence and energy, establishing Jacobin clubs in England. Ultimately republican France attacked its neighbors and caused mighty disturbance in the established order of Europe. No Thucydides trap at all, simple preventive self defense against a nation with feverish ideas and expansionist tendencies.

In the case of China XXI Century, no ideology, just commercial expansion, perfectly assimilable by the community of nations.