It behooves thoughtful observers to avoid or escape such traps when encountered or anticipated.Īt least six important traps are evident in Thucydides’s account: power transition (my term for the trap discussed in Allison’s book), strategy-polity mismatch, spiral of violence, “victory disease”, might-makes-right, and imperial overstretch. Thucydides’s history suggests a variety of traps that affect how and why nations go to war, and the awareness and avoidance of potential traps are matters of judgment or choice that those analyzing them might apply in analogous circumstances. and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” Although Allison’s version of the trap highlights one Thucydidean insight, it is a very limited perspective.Īs shorthand, a trap is a choice that suggests a negative situation, peril, or catastrophe into which the protagonists placed themselves, individually or collectively.
relations with China in his book “ Destined for War.
Recently, Harvard political scientist Graham Allison used the idea of Thucydides’s trap to consider U.S. Thucydides offered rich material for future generations through a powerful account that courses across many of the timeless threads of human struggle that define war. He selected significant pieces of the war’s history that would convey key themes and narratives. The pieces of the war are laid out before the reader in chronological order (with some exceptions) by an analyst and witness who knew how the story ended. Thucydides, an exiled Athenian naval commander cum historian, provided one of history’s most valuable analytical works on war. The account’s great virtue is the complexity conveyed about one of humanity’s most profound challenges: war. Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War* (431 to 404 B.C.E.) defies simple summarizing in one cautionary lesson or trap. Great works of human pathos rarely distill to simplicity. Imposing an artificial simplicity on Thucydides’s work makes it harder to understand the full range of warnings that his history gives.
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