Against Thucydides

Thucydides warned that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” The resulting catastrophe unavoidable, the Thucydides Trap has found a comfortable place in geopolitical thought to describe the rising pressure that the People’s Republic of China is placing on the United States. China is Athens; America is Sparta; Taiwan is floating in the Aegean. For most, the characters assigned to their historical roles appear to write the ending itself. 

A gross oversimplification. Athens and Sparta were not sharing supply chains nor investing in each other’s pension funds. No Spartan merchants were waiting for Athenian customs officials to clear their containers. There was no Athenian-Spartan business council. The signs of Chinese growth were ever apparent too, and yet American officials seemed to be ecstatic: Nixon’s famous 1972 visit, their recognition of the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China only seven years later, the designation of the PRC as Most Favoured Nation. After 30~ years of China existing as a stable state, their value and importance became paramount to the USA, and the war dogs may bark all they want; it still is.

There is still credit to Thycidides, and we should not pretend that there is no butting of heads between the two colossi. The 2010s saw a sharp uptick in American disillusionment over Chinese strategy in the South China Sea and American salience in discovery of a maturing Chinese intelligence community. Not like these transgressions are foreign to America; in a way, it saw its little sister grow up and start wearing its old dresses, taking great offense at their perceived fashion faux-pas. What followed is the China-USA relationship of the 20th century we are reminded of so often by today’s media, one of deeply incompatible institutional values and the creeping take-over of dominance in the world stage. Best not to forget that the reliance on Chinese business never disappeared, and the finger-wagging did not dissuade markets from increasing American-Chinese trade value over 200 billion dollars from 2010-2018. (census.gov) Trump’s trade war is very real, but there is personal doubt towards whether this was a calculated decision based on repeated declining relations or the ambitions of a personal few. 

For roughly half a century, Washington and Beijing could maintain fundamentally different politics and still increase their economic integration. The question is no longer how to restore the relationship that existed before Xi and Trump, trade wars, COVID and Taiwan. That relationship is gone. We must now ask what replaces it.