Gan Yang, ​“Thucydides and the ‘Thucydides Trap’” 

Gan Yang, “Thucydides and the ‘Thucydides Trap’”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Gan Yang (b. 1953) has been a leading figure in China’s thought world since the 1980s, when he led one of the first major translation projects in the post-Cultural Revolution period (Culture:  China and the World/文化: 中国与世界), a massive effort to make important Western works in philosophy and history available to Chinese intellectuals.  He has not slowed down since.  In terms of ideas, some of Gan’s statements (such as this one) suggest an affiliation with the New Confucians, while others (such as this one) identify him with the New Left.  In fact, he seems largely uninterested in defining himself as belonging to a particular school or group, and is instead adept at capturing the zeitgeist of a particular moment in a catchy slogan or summary, thus setting the agenda for other scholars, as he did with his concept of “unifying the three traditions.” 
 
Gan Yang is also known as an institution-builder in China, and one of the causes he has championed over the years is that of old-school liberal arts education in China, the kind that is based in the classic texts of Western (as well as Chinese) civilization.  Like his colleague Liu Xiaofeng, Gan is something of an anti-modernist and a follower of Leo Strauss, and believes that a non-Western reading of the Western classics might be one way to salvage the humanistic tradition the modern West might be seen to have betrayed (click here for a taste of this side of Gan).  The text translated here is in fact related to Gan’s humanist persona, and as he explains, it is a version of the final lecture he gives to his first-year class at Tsinghua University on Ancient Greek Civilization, presented as a public lecture at East China Normal University in Shanghai in October of 2021.  A transcript of the piece was published on Aisixiang on January 1, 2022, to start the new year off with a bang.
 
Gan’s text is quite ominous, beginning with the statement that “I chose today’s topic because I believe that the issue of war and peace is emerging as the most important issue of our time.”  Clearly, he is talking about the dangerous drift of Sino-American relations over the past few years, and he frames his inquiry around the different ways in which American scholars of international relations have understood the Thucydides trap over the past few decades.
 
It was of course Graham Allison, former Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, that first linked the Thucydides trap to Sino-American relations, suggesting that war is inevitable when a rising power strikes fear into the heart of a currently dominant power.  As Gan observes, Allison’s framing kicked up a minor storm at the outset, both in the United States and in China, but has since become a common way to talk about the relationship (despite a certain amount of pushback), even if this suggests that the unthinkable—war between China and the United States—is imminent.
 
Gan notes, however, that this is not Thucydides’ first rodeo, and that the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union was also analyzed in terms of the Thucydides trap.  At the time, however, American analysts rejected the inevitability of war as an outcome, and hence decided that Thucydides was wrong.  They accomplished this by distinguishing between “deep causes” (i.e., the fear of a rising rival) and “proximate causes” (i.e., the specific crises that push rivals over the brink and into war) and arguing that the proximate causes were manageable.  In other words, close attention to crises that might lead to war might prevent war itself, thus erasing its inevitability.  Allison himself had been a leading scholar of the crisis-management school before revising his understanding of Thucydides and the Thucydides trap in the context of Sino-American relations.
 
Gan’s obvious question is:  What happened?  Where did crisis-management go?  One answer might be that while the U.S. was Athens during the Cold War, it now sees itself as Sparta.  For Athens, war is inevitable, and you lose.  For Sparta, war may be inevitable, but you ultimately win—if at a great cost.  This is not the answer Gan puts forward, however.
 
Gan’s argument is that a better reading of Thucydides identifies honor—and not fear—as the key emotion at the heart of international relations.  In other words, it is less America’s fear of a newly risen China (which remains considerably weaker than the U.S. in virtually every aspect) but its wounded honor at being challenged by an ungrateful upstart that leads it to throw caution to the wind and talk about the inevitability of war (or at least to lose sight of crisis management as an important policy goal).  Gan also suggests that the smugness of American exceptionalism may be prodded along by the shadow of American racism.  He pointedly wonders whether America would have dropped a nuclear bomb on Germany had it been ready before the end of the war, and notes the relative lack of discussion that preceded the use of the bomb in Japan.  I might note that Gan is not the first to raise such questions, nor does he do so lightly.
 
I have never read Thucydides and thus have no idea how to evaluate Gan Yang’s reading of The History of the Peloponnesian War as opposed to Graham Allison’s.  But if he is correct that Allison—among others, other course—has changed his tune since the Cold War, then I think this something that is definitely worth thinking about long and hard.  I might note as well that while the brunt of Gan’s text addresses the movers and shakers of the American foreign policy establishment, there is a none-too-subtle message for China’s Wolf Warriors as well:  what brought Athens down was over-confidence and a lack of moderation.  Let’s be careful out there.
 
Favorite Quotes

“During the Cold War, the United States saw itself as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta, which meant that it had to learn the lessons of Athens and proceed with caution. In Thucydides' description, the Athenians' greatest characteristic was their daring—they dared to innovate, they dared to take risks, they dared to make breakthroughs, but the problem was that the Athenians did not know what moderation was, and everything was done to excess.  The Spartans' characteristic was prudence, they were extremely restrained, reticent, and always made decisions and took actions half a beat slower than the others. During the Cold War, only by learning restraint could the United States avoid repeating the mistakes of Athens.”
　　
“But in today's Sino-American relations, the U.S. sees China as Athens and itself as Sparta. Americans always feel that they are half a step behind the Chinese, and that the Chinese are continually surpassing them.  This has led the Americans to a strange mindset, and when we note in addition the fact that the U.S. won the Cold War, and the whole nation from top to bottom has been smug for the past 30 years, the superimposition of these two mentalities means that the U.S. is behaving very differently than during the Cold War, and is forgetting about moderation. Throughout the Cold War, I view the American elite as quite cautious in terms of international relations, so they would have seen the Vietnam War as a modern version of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, and considered it a very bad decision. There was a strong sense of self-restraint among the political and academic elites in general at the time, and the population was cautious, but this is no longer the case.”
 
“Modern thinkers have devalued honor, thus ignoring the fact that the issue of honor is still related to conflict between people at the most basic level. By the time he wrote Destined for War, Allison realized this problem and noted, ‘The United States and China are alike in at least one respect:   Both countries see themselves as exceptional…A conflict between two firsts is very painful to work out.’  He then goes on to quote Lee Kuan Yew: ‘The replacement of the United States by an Asian nation it has long seen as decadent, weak, corrupt, and foolish, even if only in the Western Pacific and not throughout the world, is still emotionally difficult for the United States to accept. American’s sense of cultural superiority will make this adjustment especially difficult.’   What he is talking about here is, of course, honor.”
 
“We might well ask: If the atomic bomb had been successfully tested before Germany's defeat, would the Allies have had no qualms about using it immediately to bomb Germany? Many researchers agree that the Allies would have been much more cautious in their decision to use it in Europe.  Even if everyone hated the Nazis, the English and Americans had no doubt that there were many Germans who were upstanding and worthy of respect. In 1995, I wrote a long article discussing this issue, which I think has not disappeared today, especially at a moment when the U.S. sees itself as Sparta and creates a lot of moral arguments out of thin air.”
 
Links to other texts on this site
 
For links to other texts on Sino-American relations, click here 
 
Translation
 
I chose today’s topic because I believe that the issue of war and peace is emerging as the most important issue of our time. I would like to see at least one course on war and peace in the general education curriculum of Chinese universities, but as far as I know, this is not the case at present. It is not difficult to understand why, because on the one hand, we have been at peace for a long time and war seems far away, and on the other, this is a difficult course to teach.
 
The content of the talk I’m giving today comes from the final lecture of a general course on Ancient Greek Civilization that I give to undergraduates at Tsinghua University.  I would like to take this opportunity to share some rough ideas with my friends from East China Normal University and from Shanghai, in the hopes of learning from them.
　　
The phrase "Thucydides trap" is now a household word in both China and the United States, but I think that at the university level there are still a few questions we should ask. First of all, we should be extremely surprised that today’s Westerners would think that a book written by an ancient Greek historian more than 2,500 years ago can still be used to describe and understand the most important issue of the twenty-first century—the relationship between China and the United States.
 
I always ask my students, given the huge number of pre-Qin classics in China, whether there is not a single book from that canon, that could describe Sino-American relations today. Of course there is, for example the Zuo Zhuan.[2] It's just that we don't think of it that way.
 
This is an excellent question to reflect on. Tradition and the classics are alive in the West and are not merely documents or objects studied by specialists.  Instead, they remain intricately linked to modern thinking, and such a living tradition inevitably deepens the heft of culture and scholarship. In comparison, our traditions and classics, at least for the moment, are not yet active in our hearts and minds, but are more just objects and materials for experts to study. I think a necessary prerequisite for a real and comprehensive revival of Chinese civilization is that our classics be fully revived and re-enter our reflections, otherwise our thinking will remain very superficial.
 
Regarding Thucydides and the "Thucydides trap," I will focus on three aspects today.
 
First, this is not in fact the first time that modern Westerners have used the views of Thucydides, a historian who lived more than 2,000 years ago, to describe and analyze the most significant contemporary events of an era. The first time occurred during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War era. Some seventy years ago, at the very beginning of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, Americans generally viewed the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union as a replay of the relationship between Athens and Sparta. This view profoundly influenced the development of Western international political theory, and this theory, as it matured after World War II, was closely related to Thucydides.
　　
Second, precisely because the reading of Thucydides at the time was so closely intertwined with Western thinking about the Cold War, this in turn greatly influenced and even changed the way Westerners read Thucydides. During the Cold War, mainstream scholars of Thucydides as well as scholars of international politics began to question, challenge, and thus subvert Thucydides' most fundamental assertion—the idea that war between Athens and Sparta was inevitable. They argued that this assertion was wrong.
 
I have always advocated reading the classics, insisting that our relationship with these works is not merely one-way, as if we had to choose either to worship them or to reject them; as I see it, the relationship instead is two-way, and the very nature of a classic means that contemporary people can ask new questions about it, challenge it, doubt it, and in so doing enrich the questions the classic itself raised. Because his basic assertions had been questioned, Thucydides' status began to decline in the scholarly world, probably during the latter stages of the Cold War.
 
If we admit that, over the course of the 20th century, and especially since the end of the World War II, Western historiography, classics, and international political theory have taken it as their mission to escape the Thucydides trap, then the third question is: Why did the West suddenly jump back into this trap in the twenty-first century, when issues in Sino-American relations came to the fore? There are two major historians of ancient Greece, Herodotus and Thucydides, and beginning in the 1990s, the status of Herodotus soared while that of Thucydides declined, but in 2012, Thucydides returned to the top.
　
Let's briefly review how the so-called "Thucydides' trap" came to be attached to Sino-US relations. The American political scientist Graham Allison (b. 1940) first published a short article in the Financial Times on August 22, 2012 ("Thucydides's Trap Has Been Sprung in the Pacific"), asserting that "the question that will define the global order for decades to come will be:  Can China and the United States avoid the Thucydides trap?"
 
Subsequently, this viewpoint came to enjoy a certain limited popularity in Chinese and American academic and political circles, but it really exploded three years later, when Allison published another article on The Atlantic website on September 24, 2015, entitled "The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War? " This particular date was chosen because it coincided with the official visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to the United States, and his meeting with President Barack Obama was set for the next day, September 25. The first sentence of Allison’s article is:  “When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade.” 
 
Note the precision of Allison’s sentence.  He doesn’t say that war between the U.S. and China is possible “at some point” or “in the future,” but rather “the next decade,” in other words, before 2025.  No doubt Allison said this to display or even show off his "foresight.”
 
Alison is a somewhat singular character.  He is a typical American scholar who is equally at home in politics and academics.[3]  As an academic, he served as dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government during its expansion from 1977 to 1989, and countless political dignitaries from all over the world studied under him. In politics, he has been a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board since 1985, and his highest official rank is Assistant Secretary of Defense. With his status, and his image of being extremely knowledgeable about China, an article like this appearing at this juncture would obviously make a big media splash.
 
What we call the "Thucydides trap" is based on a quote from Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, which Allison translates as follows: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” According to Allison, in the twenty-first century, the word "China" can be substituted for "Athens" and "America" for "Sparta."  In 2017, he expanded this article into a book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?  which was rapidly translated into Chinese, appearing in 2019.
 
Incidentally, in 2016, Allison and Stanford historian Niall Ferguson, in a joint article in the Atlantic Monthly and in the “Applied History Manifesto” published by the Harvard Kennedy School, proposed the creation of a White House Council of Historical Advisers, whose first task would be to answer key questions surrounding the China’s rise.  We might note that that, a decade earlier, Ferguson’s and Allison’s views on China had been completely different. In 2006, Ferguson and the economist Moritz Schularick coined the English word "Chimerica," which referred to the closely linked relationship between the two countries.  They optimistically argued that the 21st century would be jointly governed by China and the United States, with the U.S. as the largest consumer and China as the largest producer, producing natural complementarities. But at least by 2016, Ferguson had completely adopted Allison’s perspective, which was a very rapid change.
 
When Allison proposed the "Thucydides trap" nearly a decade ago, there was an outcry in China and a lot of consternation in the Western world, but by now the term seems very familiar. Allison and Ferguson's proposal to set up a White House Advisory Council on History, which does not seem to have been taken up by any U.S. president, seems to me to have had more impact in China, where history now has a very prominent place in our three disciplines of literature, history and philosophy.[4]
 
The problem is that while we talk about the past and about history, for the most part we are merely talking about the past as the past. In their “Applied History Manifesto,” Allison and Ferguson quote the historian Michael Howard, who said: "All we believe about the present depends on what we believe about the past." When they value the past, they are valuing the convictions they arrive at from studying the past. We should learn from this that no amount of knowledge accumulated about the past is as important as the convictions we can acquire from the past.
 
Part One
 
Here we can transition back to the first question I’m addressing today. In thinking about Thucydides, there is no need to return to ancient history, because the most recent history, the history of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, is the history that most deserves our attention.
　　
The name of George Marshall is familiar to all Chinese of a certain age.  After the end of the war against Japan in 1945, on the eve of the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, the U.S. representative in the tripartite peace talks was General Marshall, the special envoy of the U.S. president. Marshall enjoyed a very high position in the United States: he served as the supreme commander of the Allied forces during World War II, helping President Roosevelt with strategic plans for the major theatres of the war, keeping the overall situation in mind.  Yet he ran into a brick wall in China, and efforts to end to the civil war through negotiation ultimately fell through, which was the first time Marshall had failed in his life. 
 
After returning to the United States from China in early 1947, Marshall became Secretary of State on January 21 and announced the European Recovery Plan, the famous "Marshall Plan," in a speech at Harvard University's commencement ceremony on June 5.  At the end of World War II, Eastern Europe was already part of the Communist world, and while Western Europe was not yet part of the Soviet camp, the largest political party in France was the French Communist Party, the largest in Italy was the Italian Communist Party, both of which were fully in position to win the election and take over their respective governments.  In addition, the war had just ended, devastation and material need were everywhere, and Europe suffered a succession of severe winters.  The biggest concern of the United States was that Western Europe would also fall to the Communists.
 
Hence the Marshall Plan was born: $13 billion in aid to Western Europe over four fiscal years, 90 percent in free grants and 10 percent in loans. The Marshall Plan was the first victory of the United States in the Cold War, directly saving Europe from the extreme difficulties of the postwar period and ensuring that Western Europe not slide immediately into the Soviet camp.　　
 
I would like to call everyone’s attention to the speech that Marshall gave at Princeton University on February 22, 1947, after he became Secretary of State but before he announced the Marshall Plan.  In this address, he said:
　　
“It has been said that one should be interested in the past only as a guide to the future. I do not fully concur with this. One usually emerges from an intimate understanding of the past with its lessons and its wisdom, with convictions which put fire in the soul. I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.”[5]
 
Marshall "begs to differ" with a pragmatic, utilitarian view of history, which does not allow us to learn any real lessons from it. In his view, only a clear understanding of the negative and positive aspects of Western history can lead to firm convictions. As far as "the fundamental problems of international relations today" are concerned, that is, the bipolar world of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., he believes it is necessary to "revisit the era of the Peloponnesian War" and, in particular, "the fall of Athens."   This is the conclusion of the quotation, and it is also its center of gravity.
　　
At the beginning of the Cold War, it was very natural, not only for Marshall but also for the American government and people, to look at the U.S.-Soviet competition for hegemony through the lens of the history of the Athenian and Spartan rivalry. The two were indeed quite comparable, both being struggles between two alliances: the wars of Athens and Sparta were waged against one another's allies, and the Cold War also saw the formation of two major military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, although today the Warsaw Pact no longer exists and Russia has been "encircled" by NATO.
 
In a 1977 article, Professor W. R. Connor of Princeton University, one of the leading figures in Thucydides studies at the time, makes it clear that his generation's reading of Thucydides and its understanding of the Cold War were intertwined, i.e., that they understood the Cold War through their reading of the History of the Peloponnesian War, and rethought Thucydides through the developments of the Cold War.
 
This intertwined relationship also profoundly influenced the Western tradition of international political theory, and at the time the theorists of the major schools explicitly took Thucydides as their master and summed up their different stances with different references to him. Classical realists quoted the following passage: "It is an immutable law of nature to rule as long as there is power.  We believe this law to be true of God, and we know this law to be true of man."  For classical realists, human nature is the pursuit of power and the pursuit of domination, so this school is also called human realism. A student of mine read this and said, "People today don't seek power, they just want to earn money.” I said, "What is money? Money is the greatest power in modern times, and when you have lots of money it is natural to want to rule others.”
　
Another school, structural realism, also known as defensive realism, quotes Allison to describe the Thucydides trap. A common translation is: "The growing power of Athens aroused the fears of the Lacedaemonians [i.e., the Spartans], thus forcing the latter to go to war."  If classical realism argues that every party involved actively seeks power and domination, structural realism emphasizes that all nations are in a passive relationship with other countries. In the structure of international relations, any change in one state causes a reaction in the other states, so that if one state suddenly grows, or another suddenly disappears, the other states are all affected.  This school takes the structure of the system, not human nature, as its starting point.
 
Here is how John J. Mearsheimer, a representative of the school of offensive realism, describes the distinction between the three schools of realism in his famous book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:  These leading theories of international politics basically took shape during the Cold War, originating with Thucydides, and then connecting to previous traditions to develop into full-blown theories. After the end of the Cold War, other schools naturally appeared as well, such as international institutionalism or liberalism, promoting views different from realism, but even proponents of these theories would readily admit that their views were not replacing realism, but merely adding to it.
 
For example, the idea that international organizations can mitigate conflicts between nations is certainly a noble ambition and does occur to some extent, but the vast majority of the time it doesn’t work. The International Court of Justice in The Hague can say what it wants to today and the U.N. can adopt its favorite resolution tomorrow, but if the U.S. does not implement it, China opposes it, and Russia vetoes it, then what difference did the international organizations make? Most people who work in international relations see the field as a zone of anarchy, where the law of the jungle is practiced, although at the same time there are always efforts to establish rules that all countries will accept, even if the rules are quite fragile.
 
I want to emphasize in particular that political realism is definitely not the same as warmongering. Mearsheimer says, "True realists were firmly opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the attack on Iraq, and U.S. interventionism," and "only liberals go around waging war and preaching morality."  What realists most despise is waging war in the name of democracy, human rights, and the like, which they see as the greatest danger. 
 
Hans J. Morgenthau, a representative of classical realism who laid the foundations of the discipline of international politics in his Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948), criticized the Truman Doctrine, insisting that, "If a state emphasizes moral principles at the expense of the national interest, it runs the risk of national self-destruction."
 
Morgenthau was a German Jew who fled to the United States in 1937. After living in various parts of the country, he discovered that Americans were particularly fond of boasting about everything they did, saying that their actions on the international scene were motivated by morality and were intended to help other countries.  Morgenthau believed Americans were deceiving themselves and other people in saying such things, and that American actions on the international scene all sought to pursue the national interests of the United States.
 
Morgenthau served twice as an advisor to the U.S. State Department before being dismissed by President Johnson for his opposition to the Vietnam War. According to Morgenthau, the issue of war and peace is one of the core national interests, which are defined by three "minimum requirements:" national territory, the political system, and the cultural base. Only when territorial integrity is involved, or when the enemy wants to subvert your basic political system, or dismantle your cultural foundation can you go to war; otherwise, any war is unjustified, unnecessary, and is a deviation from core national interests. Morgenthau accurately judged that distant Vietnam was not a place that the U.S. and the Soviet Union needed to fight over, that Vietnam’s political demands were nationalist and anti-colonial, and that American intervention was unnecessary.
 
Similarly, Mearsheimer believes that the war in Iraq was an unnecessary war and a thoroughly wrong-headed misadventure. Mearsheimer was brave enough to write The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), in which he challenged and criticized Jewish groups in Israel and the U.S., arguing that U.S. foreign policy had been hijacked by these groups and led in directions that completely departed from U.S. national interests. One can argue that rather than being hawks, realists are extremely cautious about war, constantly emphasizing that it is a last resort and an extremely frightening thing.
 
In contrast, those enamored of war seem to be liberals and other "woke 白左" groups, the most notorious being Habermas, who supported the war in Kosovo, and the Western “liberal hawks” who supported George W. Bush’s Iraq war in 2003 in the media.  While they may normally be critical of the United States, on this occasion they were certain that the United States had taken the moral high ground and was doing the right thing. Perhaps this is why Chairman Mao told Nixon that he "preferred the right, and was rather happy to have them in power."
 
During the Cold War, the U.S. saw itself as Athens, and the central question was how to avoid repeating Athens’s mistakes. This is precisely why the words of Marshall and Morgenthau quoted above must be read as grave and solemn, and not at all complacent or self-congratulatory. No one knew who would win if a war broke out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so caution was the keynote.
 
The historical Peloponnesian War ended in a total defeat for Athens, and the United States was indeed very much like Athens. The U.S. leapt to become the number one global power after World War II, and Athens entered its golden age after the Greco-Persian Wars. In addition, the Cold War was a time when nuclear war loomed, and once nuclear weapons were on the table, all considerations about war had to be rethought. At the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, the first U.S. Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear warfare projected that in the first week of war, casualties in the Soviet camp would be between 360 million and 525 million, including China. The total global population in the early 1960s was just over 3 billion, including 350 million in Europe, less than 200 million in the United States, just over 200 million in the Soviet Union, 670 million in China, and 450 million in India. The prospect of nuclear war was unacceptable to everyone. Because the core territory of the U.S.-Soviet conflict was Europe, Europe became the center of anti-nuclear, anti-war efforts. 
 
For all of these reasons, it was inevitable at the time that Westerners would have to rethink Thucydides.  If Thucydides' arguments were valid, then the war between Athens and Sparta was inevitable, and the defeat of Athens was equally inevitable, which meant that America’s future demise was clear. Yet was all of this really inevitable? Was Athens bound to suffer such a fate?
 
Part Two
 
We can now proceed to a reading of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides' book is exceptional and indeed masterfully written. In terms of structure, the entire book is an exercise in self-irony and self-deconstruction 自我反讽和自我解构. The book consists of eight volumes, and after reading the first volume no one will doubt the direction in which the war in heading. Athens and Sparta are at war, and of course Athens will win and Sparta will lose. Athens has all the people, money, and ships that it needs, while Sparta is poor, sparsely populated and has a weak navy that is hardly worth mentioning. 
 
Worst of all, Sparta is part of an alliance, but it is an extremely loose alliance, and Sparta is not the leader. But this just goes to illustrate the trajectory of the book, in that at the beginning, Athens is at its peak, indeed all of Greek civilization is at its peak, but then the descent begins, and when we reach the low point, in the eighth volume, we glimpse not only the failure of Athens in the context of the war, but also the failure of human nature, and the total disintegration of the Greek spirit and morality.
　
Athens’ decline is clear in each volume. For example, Pericles’s funeral oration, which we Chinese are very familiar with and often quote positively, if one-sidedly, appears in Book II, chapters 35 to 46, but immediately afterwards, in chapters 47 to 52, Thucydides writes about the Athenian plague.
 
In his state funeral oration, Pericles had extolled the greatness of Athens with the utmost praise, in order to prove that the generals who died for their country died a good death for a great Athens, illustrating in their death all the virtues of the Athenians. When Westerners quote Pericles, they seem to be equating the greatness of Athens with the greatness of the West. However, the plague that broke out in the following year completely wiped out everything that Pericles had said:
 
“The disaster was overpowering, and as people did not know what would become of them, they tended to neglect the sacred and the secular alike. All the funeral customs which had previously been observed were thrown into confusion and the dead were buried in any way possible. Many who lacked friends, because so many had died before them, turned to shameless forms of disposal: some would put their own dead on someone else's pyre, and set light to it before those who had prepared it could do so themselves; others threw the body they were carrying on to the top of another's pyre when it was already alight, and slipped away.”
 
“In other respects, too, the plague marked the beginning of a decline to greater lawlessness in the city. People were more willing to dare to do things which they would not previously have admitted to enjoying, when they saw the sudden changes of fortune, as some who were prosperous suddenly died, and their property was immediately acquired by others who had previously been destitute. So they thought it reasonable to concentrate on immediate profit and pleasure, believing that their bodies and their possessions alike would be short-lived. No one was willing to persevere in struggling for what was considered an honorable result, since he could not be sure that he would not perish before he achieved it. What was pleasant in the short term, and what was in any way conducive to that, came to be accepted as honorable and useful. No fear of the gods or law of men had any restraining power, since it was judged to make no difference whether one was pious or not as all alike could be seen dying. No one expected to live long enough to have to pay the penalty for his misdeeds: people tended much more to think that a sentence already decided was hanging over them, and that before it was executed, they might reasonably get some enjoyment out of life.” [6]
　
These chapters of Thucydides convey profound meaning through subtle prose 春秋笔法. The funeral is a ceremony that highlights the glory of humanity, showing how human beings differ from animals and will be respected after death. How grand were the state funeral ceremonies for the fallen soldiers, how elaborate the rituals, yet with the plague, burials became as horrible as they had once been grand, as the “glorious humanity” disappeared completely. Pericles was saying that everything was so fragile that a single test could reveal the vulnerability of the entire fabric of Athenian humanity. A people with true moral integrity would not have fallen so low, so quickly, simply because of a disaster.
 
Let's move on to Chapter 23 of Volume One, which Allison draws on the explain the Thucydides Trap.  This chapter provides a general outline of the book, and has traditionally been given special attention. Roughly the first twenty chapters of the book, known as the archaeological narrative, deal with Athens, Sparta, and Greece before the Peloponnesian War, and in chapter 23 he begins to discuss the war. "The greatest event of the past was the Persian War, but that war was settled quickly after two naval battles and two land battles. Today’s war has been much longer, and over time has brought unprecedented disasters to Greece." The Persian War may have been "the greatest event of the past," but clearly the Peloponnesian War was greater, the most important war Greece had known up to the time of Thucydides.
 
But was it the greatest honor, or the greatest disgrace? Was it the highest point of humanity, or the lowest? Thucydides' answer to both questions is clearly the latter. Think about that fact that in China, we were at war with Japan for 14 years and in total war for eight, after which we were completely exhausted and could not bear it anymore, so that when the war ended, whoever started a civil war would be seen as the bad guy.  Yet the Peloponnesian War was fought for a full twenty-seven years.
 
"Never before have so many city-states been turned upside down and razed to rubble…never have so many people been displaced, never before have so many people been killed, some in wars between city-states and some in internecine city-state fighting…There were earthquakes,  eclipses, droughts, famine, and the most murderous pestilence.  All of these natural disasters came with the war."
 
In what was called the Greek Age of Enlightenment before the war, people probably did not believe in disasters, just as modern people believe only in science, but the war turned all of man's original beliefs upside down. As Thucydides said, "War is a teacher of cruelty."  We are taught in times of peace not to kill, not to set fires, not to rape, not to steal, not to lie, all of which are prerequisites for the existence of civilization, and war means that all of these basic rules of civilization in times of peace are completely destroyed, meaning that killing is the norm and rape and pillage are everywhere.
 
Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, but in fact the experience was a death sentence for Greek civilization as a whole.  It survived for a bit, but it was soon conquered by Macedonia, then by Rome, then came the Byzantine Empire, and finally the Ottoman Empire, and Greece did not achieve independence until the 19th century.  One might say that present-day Greece and ancient Greece have nothing to do with one another.  In other words, the war was a complete disaster for all the city-states of ancient Greece.
 
So how did it really happen? The Athenians were so smart, and the Spartans were so cautious, didn't it occur to either of them that the war might lead to total self-destruction? Thus Thucydides turns to an investigation of the causes of the war: "The war began (in 431 B.C.) when the Athenians and the Peloponnesians tore up the Thirty Years' Peace Treaty, which they themselves had signed fifteen years earlier (in 446 B.C.). As for the reasons that led them to abrogate the treaty, I will first record the reasons for their mutual reproach and the points of contention, so that future generations will not have to ask why there was such a large-scale war between the Greeks as a direct result. But the unstated real cause of this war, I believe, was the growing power of Athens, which aroused the fear of the Lacedaemonians, and thus drove the latter to war."
 
Thucydides identifies two causes of war: the "proximate cause" and the "true cause." The meaning of Thucydides' choice of words is clear: the "proximate cause" is unimportant and is merely the "reason for mutual reproach" on both sides, but what is important is the "unspoken true cause."  What we call the "Thucydides trap" was created because the "true cause" of the war—Athens’ rise and the fear this rise generated for Sparta—made war inevitable.  But it was in the perception of the causes of the war that scholars of Thucydides and international political took a turn during the Cold War.
 
Unlike Thucydides, these Cold War scholars believed that the immediate causes of war, especially crises or other events leading to war, were important independent variables in international politics. The immediate causes of conflict are as important as the deeper causes of war. The avoidance of war depends on the ability to give high priority to the immediate causes of conflict, i.e., to defuse crises.
　
Donald Kagan's (1932-1921) The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, an influential book of the Cold War era, is representative of this turn. Kagan, who died this year, for decades taught "Introduction to Ancient Greek History" and "The Origins of War" at Yale, the most popular general education courses at the university. His oldest son, Robert Kagan (b. 1958) is another figure who shuttles between academics and politics, an important figure in the Republican Party, and a neoconservative standard bearer.
 
The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War was published in 1969, intended for both general readers and specialists.  It is the first and most important of Kagan's four-volume Essays on the History of the Peloponnesian War (1969, 1974, 1981, 1987). Kagan opens the book by asking the classic question:
 
“Thucydides saw the war as inevitable…[His] brilliant depiction of the rise of the Athenian Empire and the Spartan reaction makes it seem like both sides had no choice but to go to war…But we have to ask if the détente created by the Thirty Years Peace Treaty could not have lasted? Were there no other policies that could have been substituted for those that led to the outbreak of war? Surely it was not in the self-interest of Sparta or Athens to go to war?”
 
His conclusion is very clear:
　　
“Thucydides was the first to draw a distinction between deep and superficial causes of war…He argued that the deep causes were more important than the superficial causes…His view was widely accepted…Our research shows that his judgment was wrong…There is good reason to believe that the two powers and their allies could have continued to live in peace. Therefore, we believe that it was not these deeper causes that caused the war, but rather those crisis events that occurred on the eve of the war.”
　　
I fully agree with Kagan's question, but I disagree with almost all of his specific assertions, his explanation of the immediate causes. Kagan's explanations come basically from the Athenian standpoint; he writes about Athens and Sparta with the United States and the Soviet Union in mind, so that contemporary terms like "polarization" and "power blocs" are all over the book, as well as analogies to various twentieth-century historical events.
 
There were certainly many immediate causes of the Peloponnesian War, the most widely known being the dispute between Corinth and its colony of Korkyra, sparked by civil unrest in the city of Epidamnos. Athens' willingness to join forces with Korkyra against Corinth, which was part of the Peloponnesian League, was motivated by self-interest, since Korkyra's naval power ranked among the top three in Greece, and this power could not be ceded to the Peloponnesians.  However, in Kagan's explanation, the Corinthians bore "most of the responsibility" for the outbreak of war, which I do not think is consistent with Thucydides' intentions.
 
We can see from Thucydides' later writings that Korkyra, with its supposedly powerful navy, did not play the role in the war that Athens wanted it to play in the first place. In addition, Korkyra was a very nasty city-state that engaged in mutual slaughter during the civil strife, completely destroying the most basic laws of civilization in the Greek world, and it can be said that it was the starting point of moral and spiritual corruption in the whole Greek world. Of course, Thucydides's rhetorical devices are very clever, but Leo Strauss argues that "his judgments are incomplete" concerning the people and politics he describes, and that he often "inadvertently reverses the chronology of events," and when the narrative context of certain events is changed, the meaning changes as well.  In addition, some of the historical texts Thucydides refers to are incomplete.  For example, Kagan's book notes that there is “no copy or transcription” of the Thirty Years Peace Treaty  and we can only "piece together its contents" through "scattered quotations."  Despite all of this, I find the baseline and narrative arc of Thucydides' book quite clear.  He is reviewing Athens's problems, a series of audacious acts that led to a posture of a lack of self-restraint.
 
Setting aside specific explanations, it is at the very least clear that the entire focus of research during the Cold War period shifted to the examination of proximate causes. One might go so far as to say the greatest Western advance in international politics in the twentieth century was the rethinking of the importance of proximate causes, or what we call “crises,” for short. The subtitle of Between Peace and War, the 1981 book written by the American political scientist Richard Ned Lebow is "The Nature of International Crisis."  In the concluding chapter of the book, entitled "Refuting the 'Thucydides Trap,'" he asserts that "the immediate causes of war play an important, even decisive, role in the course of conflict" and that severe international crises "can determine whether war breaks out or peace continues" and "they can also exacerbate interstate conflicts or become a deeper cause in resolving conflicts, thus avoiding the outbreak of war."
 
In the age of nuclear war, one must do whatever it takes to avoid it, or else accept a certain fatalism.  Although he later came back to the Thucydides Trap, Allison was himself a master of crisis decision-making, and his famous study of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971, 1999), was the benchmark work in international political science marking the shift toward the study of the proximate causes of war. After a detailed analysis of three explanatory models of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Allison admits: "No event has shown more clearly than the Cuban Missile Crisis what a horrifying distinction exists between the impossibility and the unlikely occurrence of nuclear war. The more one learns about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the more one begins to believe that in reality nuclear war could very well happen."
 
The fact that the world avoided nuclear war after these unique thirteen days is in part due to the element of chance. That is why Allison says, "We have no reason to be optimistic about nuclear crises and the possibility of war."  Today, decision-making and research on decision-making have become so complex that any major decision has to reconcile the interests of all parties, and as Kennedy says, "the ultimate nature of decision-making remains incomprehensible to the observer—and indeed often to the decision-maker himself ."
 
Throughout the Cold War, the general trends among students of Thucydides and of international politics was to try to go beyond Thucydides' determinism and avoid what he called the inevitable, so the focus of research shifted to the immediate causes of war and the crises that trigger it, and Western scholars believed or hoped that humanity was capable of arriving at a solution. Allison himself is certainly aware of this, which makes his sudden return to the deeper causes of the Thucydides trap in 2012 unusual.
 
Part Three
 
Next, I compare the differences between the two most recent Western appropriations of Thucydides from two perspectives.
　　
Let's start with the first. During the Cold War, the United States saw itself as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta, which meant that it had to learn the lessons of Athens and proceed with caution. In Thucydides' description, the Athenians' greatest characteristic was their daring—they dared to innovate, they dared to take risks, they dared to make breakthroughs, but the problem was that the Athenians did not know what moderation was, and everything was done to excess.  The Spartans' characteristic was prudence, they were extremely restrained, reticent, and always made decisions and took actions half a beat slower than the others. During the Cold War, only by learning restraint could the United States avoid repeating the mistakes of Athens.
　　
But in today's Sino-American relations, the U.S. sees China as Athens and itself as Sparta. Americans always feel that they are half a step behind the Chinese, and that the Chinese are continually surpassing them.  This has led the Americans to a strange mindset, and when we note in addition the fact that the U.S. won the Cold War, and the whole nation from top to bottom has been smug for the past 30 years, the superimposition of these two mentalities means that the U.S. is behaving very differently than during the Cold War, and is forgetting about moderation. Throughout the Cold War, I view the American elite as quite cautious in terms of international relations, so they would have seen the Vietnam War as a modern version of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, and considered it a very bad decision. There was a strong sense of self-restraint among the political and academic elites in general at the time, and the population was cautious, but this is no longer the case.
 
Now for the second perspective. The Cold War led people to focus more on the proximate causes of war than on the deeper causes that made war inevitable, the emphasis in the Thucydides trap that has reemerged in this century. Once the deeper causes are highlighted, there is a danger that the immediate causes of war will be obscured or downplayed. Let me emphasize that the deep causes or the "structural pressures of the Thucydides Trap" are real, both then and now, but it is precisely because of the deep causes that we must give high priority to the immediate causes that make war possible.
 
Allison's description of the Thucydides Trap highlights the concept of "fear," but in Thucydides, there is a triple structure of "honor, fear, and profit.” In my opinion, we should not attribute what we call the deeper causes to "fear" alone, especially in the face of today's situation, but should link them instead to "honor."
 
Before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, an Athenian delegation to Sparta addressed the Spartan citizens' assembly with the intention of preventing the war, and in two quite similar expressions they employed, we see the three concepts deployed in a different order:
 
“What drives us Athenians is first fear, second honor, and finally profit.”
　　
“(Human nature) is subject to three insurmountable factors: honor, fear, and profit…The weak are subservient to the strong and always have been.”
　　
The reason for the change in order here is simple: Chapter 75 describes the moment of the Greco-Persian War, when Athens, then still weak, had to rise up against the threat of the Persian Empire out of fear; by the time the war was over, Athens had become the largest city-state in the Greek world, and then the three could be arranged in the order preferred by human nature: honor, fear, and profit.
 
Since the seventeenth century, Hobbes, Adam Smith and others have argued that going to war for reasons of honor is completely stupid, that honor is illusory, and this became a major turning point in modern Western thought. This pushed fear to the top of the list, because Hobbes believed that it was the natural nature of man to fear death, especially violent death.  In addition, one notes that an intellectual tendency in the modern West was to replace honor with profit, because profit is real—it can be measured, quantified, and exchanged, but honor cannot, and many scholars believe that replacing honor with profit was a prerequisite for the success of capitalism in the West.
　
Modern thinkers have devalued honor, thus ignoring the fact that the issue of honor is still related to conflict between people at the most basic level. By the time he wrote Destined for War, Allison realized this problem and noted, "The United States and China are alike in at least one respect:   Both countries see themselves as exceptional…A conflict between two firsts is very painful to work out."  He then goes on to quote Lee Kuan Yew: "The replacement of the United States by an Asian nation it has long seen as decadent, weak, corrupt, and foolish, even if only in the Western Pacific and not throughout the world, is still emotionally difficult for the United States to accept. American’s sense of cultural superiority will make this adjustment especially difficult."   What he is talking about here is, of course, honor.
 
So Allison's book finally closes on the same note as Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. I have always believed that The Clash of Civilizations is the only Western work to accurately forecast the 21st century.  Rawls and Habermas were both stuck in the twentieth century, believing that mankind would follow the same path as the West did in the twentieth century, and they did not give a thought to China; only Huntington saw what they did not.
 
Today, I believe that no one doubts that what we call the era of globalization, the period of some thirty years after the end of the Cold War, has developed in accordance with Huntington's vision. A favorite saying of Chinese scholars in the late Qing Dynasty referenced “great changes that have not occurred in three thousand years,” and recently in the West certain people are talking about “great changes that have not occurred for five hundred years.”  Since the beginning of the modern era, with the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492, the world has been ruled by Western Europe and then by the United States. 
 
That this structure may be suddenly challenged by a non-Western civilization may be difficult for some in the West to accept, in that they feel that their dignity and honor as the ruling power have been offended. Otherwise it is difficult for us to understand that individual very small countries, with which we do not necessarily have any conflict of interest, have recently behaved very aggressively toward us all of a sudden. However, it is impossible for China to give up the goal of a comprehensive civilizational revival, which has been the dream of generations of Chinese since the first Sino-Japanese War at the end of the 19th century, and the Chinese do not want to be second-rate.
 
Huntington was much misunderstood when he proposed his “clash of civilizations” idea, and I would like to clarify once again that never advocated such a clash, but merely argued the conflicts in the 21st century would not center around class or gender, but instead civilization. I believe that it is not fear, not profit, but rather honor that is the root of the current clash.
　
Allison is, after all, an old Cold Warrior, and in Destined for War he notes that "the constraints imposed by 'mutually assured destruction'" during the U.S.-Soviet rivalry meant that "once two countries have impregnable nuclear arsenals, hot war was no longer a viable option" and "both sides had to compromise, even if they found it intolerable."  After the Cuban missile crisis, with the establishment of various bilateral crisis management mechanisms, the possibility of nuclear war has been largely seen as unlikely. But Allison reminds us that "today, many U.S. policymakers see [the truth of the Cold War era] as 'ancient history'" and that "no contemporary U.S. leader has been part of that history."  When U.S. political decision-makers no longer have the same caution they once did, the danger of nuclear war may instead be higher today than in the past.
 
In the preface to the Chinese edition of The Nature of Decision Making, Allison lists five nuclear crises between China and the United States during the Cold War era: the first was in 1951, during the Korean War, when General Douglas MacArthur asked President Truman to use nuclear weapons against China; the second was in 1954, when the People’s Liberation Army bombarded Jinmen, and the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the use of nuclear weapons against mainland China; the third was in 1958, when the PLA again shelled Jinmen, and the U.S. again considered using nuclear weapons against mainland coastal cities; the fourth was in 1963, on the eve of China's first atomic bomb test, when the U.S. considered a joint preemptive U.S.-Soviet nuclear strike against China to prevent China from becoming a nuclear power; and finally in 1969, during the Sino-Soviet border conflict, when the Soviet Union suggested a joint U.S.-Soviet nuclear strike against China, which was vetoed by President Nixon. I believe that the only reason that several of the early nuclear attack plans did not come to fruition was that it could have led to a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and not that the Americans had any particular taboo against using nuclear weapons against China.
 
So I want to bring up one more issue—one that Allison certainly doesn't want to talk about—the issue of racial discrimination and nuclear war. The West is clearly more willing to use nuclear weapons in Asia than in Europe. One of the reasons why Europe became an anti-war and anti-nuclear base in the Cold War era was that if a nuclear war had broken out, Europe was doomed, whereas today Europeans probably think it has nothing to do with them.
 
Fifty years after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1995, U.S. officials wanted to issue a stamp with a mushroom cloud-shaped explosion to commemorate what they were calling the "nuclear victory."  The result was an outcry of opposition from across the United States. Rawls led the charge with a fiery essay, arguing that the bombing of Hiroshima was a great evil, having overstepped the principles of justice and moral restraint expected of a democratic state in war.
 
Barton J. Bernstein, a scholar of international relations at Stanford, also noted that there was no need for the United States to use nuclear weapons at all at the time, and that it was surprising that such a major decision was reached after relatively little thought and deliberation, since the possibility of not using the bomb was never seriously discussed, and the whole process was not debated by Congress. 
 
We might well ask: If the atomic bomb had been successfully tested before Germany's defeat, would the Allies have had no qualms about using it immediately to bomb Germany? Many researchers agree that the Allies would have been much more cautious in their decision to use it in Europe.  Even if everyone hated the Nazis, the English and Americans had no doubt that there were many Germans who were upstanding and worthy of respect. In 1995, I wrote a long article discussing this issue, which I think has not disappeared today, especially at a moment when the U.S. sees itself as Sparta and creates a lot of moral arguments out of thin air. 　　
 
I would like to conclude with two quotes. One is the ancient Roman motto: "If you want peace, prepare for war!" (Si vis pacem, para bellum) The other is from the Zuo Zhuan: "The great matters of the state are sacrifice and war." Sacrifice—or ritual—represents “culture” in what Morgenthau called the three core elements of national interests. Extending the idea further, we might say that ritual behavior also cultivates people's sense of awe. A person who pays attention to ritual cultivates a conscious moral reverence for heaven and earth, for the gods, for the ancestors, and for history.
 
Thus on the one hand, we have to realize that you do not get peace because you ask for it, but on the other hand, when talking about war and peace, we have to have a kind of reverence, as if we were walking on thin ice, and verbal arguments that make light of war are dangerous. Going back to the beginning of my talk, I would like to reiterate that the issue of "war and peace" is emerging as the most important issue in the contemporary world, and I think we should treat such an issue seriously and with a sense of reverence.  We need to think about it and discuss it with seriousness.

Notes

[1]甘阳, “修昔底德与’修昔底德陷阱,’” originally presented as a talk at East China Normal University in October of 2021, posted on Aisixiang on January 1, 2022.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  The Zuo Zhuan is a commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals 春秋 composed by a certain Mr. Zuo.  The Spring and Autumn Annals chronicle the history of the state of Lu 魯 between 722 and 479 B.C.  It is the most important text for understanding this period of ancient Chinese history, and the Zuo Zhuan is a commentary that attempts to explain omissions, elisions, and cryptic statements.  Click here for more information.

[3]Translator’s note:  The charming Chinese term for this kind of person is an “amphibian 双栖动物.”

[4]Translator’s note:  The term Gao uses is 文史哲三科—literally, “the three disciplines of literature, history, and philosophy”—which is also a shorthand way of talking about the humanities in general.

[5]Translator's note:  Translation taken from https://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/digital-archive/6-026-speech-princeton-university-february-22-1947/.  

[6]Translator's note:  Translation taken from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1535/thucydides-on-the-plague-of-athens-text--commentar/ .