10 Comments

Excellent takedown! Almost exactly what I've wanted to write myself for years!

Alison is another Ivy League fad artist writing to satisfy the ego of a certain class of American. It's utter pseudoscience. That anyone dares to call what he put together "data" is a big part of why so many academic fields are trash.

He is simply constructing the world he wants to imagine exists, selling membership tickets to the western secular church. Thinkers like him are why, if there is a war, China is going to eat us alive. They've got their issues, but they respect hard science. Our leaders are happy to lose so long as they maintain a captive audience sitting in the pews.

Problem 1: What is a "Great Power" anyway? Who decides?

Problem 2: What constitutes war? How much violence across what span of time? This isn't an arbitrary concern - World War Two has a different start date depending on who you ask.

Problem 3: oh ffs, there's no point in listing them all out. The fact that nonsense like Alison's work gets talked about as if it isn't just a scholars egoist fantasy is why I never pursued a doctorate in IR. Any serious Geographer can take him apart in minutes.

Anyway, there's my rant in response to a well-written piece. Death to the Thucydides Trap. If it's named after something from ancient Greece, it's probably a scam.

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It also misunderstands Thucydides: https://scholars-stage.org/everybody-wants-a-thucydides-trap/

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Cut and pasted from Zhang Weiying's (fairly recent) talk....

"The currently widespread "Thucydides Trap" mindset is a profoundly destructive notion that could mislead the country. We must free ourselves from this intellectual constraint. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a conflict between the Athenian and Spartan alliances, was not the inevitable result of the rise of a new power, as Thucydides claimed. The war was not inevitable or natural. Instead, it resulted from political leaders' arrogance, resentment, and vengeance-driven attitudes and their ignorance, misjudgments, and third-party provocations. Athens’ excessive greed and unrealistic goals ultimately led to its catastrophic failure in the war.

Donald Kagan, a Yale University scholar, conducted in-depth research on the Peloponnesian War. He found that the politicians involved lacked foresight, mistakenly believing they could achieve significant gains at low costs. They relied on past experiences to craft strategies without adequately accounting for the risks of misjudgments and miscalculations, nor did they prepare contingency plans. Thus, the war's outbreak was neither inevitable nor the result of irresistible forces; it arose from specific decisions made in a particular context."

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Great work. I have to admit, I hate the concept of 'Thucydides' Trap'. As you note, it is also dangerously influential in US policy circles. The number of American foreign/defence policy people I see who are convinced war is coming - and almost gleeful about it - is frankly alarming.

Its not to say that conflict is not possible - just that by assuming its inevitability is deeply flawed and removes the impetus for more peaceful solutions.

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I absolutely see where you are coming from. I have not only read Dr. Alison’s book but also have read extensively about the war between Athens and Sparta. Now it is important to acknowledge that while not determined to go to war China has been extremely hawkish and more and more aggressive in its efforts against the west. That alone should drive American and other western countries to act against China and prepare for a possible conflict. It doesn’t matter if we want war or not, China wants America’s place in the world and despite all its flaws I am sure the majority of the world would rather have America rather than China as the world’s superpower.

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We 🇺🇸 absolutely must reindustrialize.

As it happens we must also rebuild our military after 20 years of our colonial dalliances.

If risking war with China is the price of rebuilding American industrial infrastructure and capacity consider we’re already in proxy war with Russia on her borders, and this plus COVID disruptions prior have a lot to do with reshoring our industries- which happens to be well under way.

This is a risk worth taking.

It’s not a war worth fighting.

The problem is powerful military’s fall into the hands of swaggering Beltwaistani “what’s the point of having a military if you don’t use it” types, so the temptation is excited.

Then again there’s our most attractive resource wise and non-nuclear Western Hemisphere neighbors.

In a choice between shameful imperialism against friends and nuclear war, choose shame to avoid nuclear war.

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“ Thucydides Trap” fits on a bumper sticker or sound bite,

We cannot afford a Thucydides Trap Gap, etc.

I wish I was being sarcastic.

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There is an obvious difference now. Atomic warfare is a possibility, and it would make victory impossible.

As long as war remains a "rational" enterprise, dictated by a cost/benefit calculation, it is off the table. Sure, there are obvious signs of growing irrationality. But not even Elon Musk will survive if there is a WWIII.

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Those signs of irrationally, it must be said, come mostly from the "West". Comparatively, China is much more "sane" - at least, as long as we consider "instrumental reason" "sane", which is another issue.

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The “Thucydides Trap”- I like the way you foreshadowed the conclusion. By mentioning at the beginning of the article that Joe Biden and the Atlantic approved it, we knew it was going to turn out to be dumb.

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