Ch. 1: Crouching Tiger Serialization

The Thucydides Trap Meets The Security Dilemma

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Question: Based on the historical record, how likely is war between a rising power like China and an established superpower like the United States? 

1.     Very likely

2.     Very unlikely

Will a rapidly rising China play the upstart Athens to America’s wary Sparta as both plunge headlong into the infamous “Thucydides Trap?” That is the historical conceit of our first question, dear detectives; and this Thucydides Trap dates back thousands of years to the Peloponnesian War – famously chronicled in the Greek classic, Plutarch’s Lives.  As the author Thucydides wrote of this quite literal Greek tragedy: "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."

Like America of today, Sparta in the 5^th century, B.C. was the reigning superpower and hegemon when Athens came bursting onto the scene and quickly emerged as the reigning civilization of its time.  As Harvard University scholar Graham Allison has observed:

This dramatic rise shocked Sparta [and] fear compelled its leaders to respond. Threat and counter-threat produced competition, then confrontation and finally conflict. At the end of 30 years of war, both states had been destroyed.

Fast-forward to the 19^th century, and we see another classic case of two great powers falling into the Thucydides Trap.  That’s when Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Germany emerged to challenge the hegemony of a British Empire that had ruled the waves – and thereby the world – for more than a century.  Ominously, the grim result of this particular clash between a rising and an established power was the slaughter of millions of soldiers and civilians in the first truly “world war.” 

Of course, two anecdotes hardly prove a theory.  That’s why this particular statistic is particularly alarming: Across the broad swath of world history, in fully 11 of the 15 times since 1500 that a rising power like China faced an established power like the United States, war resulted more than 70% of the time.[iv]  On that basis alone, no sensible speculator would want to put big money on China’s peaceful rise over the next several decades.

As to exactly why Athens v. Sparta and Germany v. Great Britain and a host of other rising versus established power pairings seem to inevitably plunge into war, University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer has produced arguably the most convincing theory of what he calls the “tragedy of great power politics.”

Mearsheimer’s theory rests on three key assumptions. The first is that the global system is anarchic rather than hierarchical – meaning there is no higher authority than nations.  The important implication of this “no night watchman” assumption is that if a nation gets into trouble, it can’t dial 9-1-1 for help.  Therefore, it must take steps to protect itself by building military capabilities.