It will be interesting to see how much of Thucydides Trap plays out in currency and trade as opposed to military conflict. I am hopeful that economic and financial warfare absorbs the brunt of the power struggle.
It will be interesting to see how much of Thucydides Trap plays out in currency and trade as opposed to military conflict. I am hopeful that economic and financial warfare absorbs the brunt of the power struggle.
Can you elaborate a little? I suspect it is a well known concept, but its the first time I heard of it in this context.
Essentially its the idea that the interaction between an incumbent power and rising "challenger" power inevitably leads to war between the two. I was expressing my hope that if this does happen, the war can play out in less destructive arenas - one of which is in the competition for reserve currency status which the US has held for the whole of the modern era. This article possibly points at China's first shots in this conflict.
Edit: credit LarsDu88 for correcting me on its age. I originally stated the idea was very old (2.5k years) but actually its a recent idea based on an ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta
The obvious counterexample would be the previous most powerful empire in the world (ie the UK) ceding that title to the USA after collapsing after WW2? No war between the UK and the US was needed.
The precious powerful empire (before Britain) was undoubtedly the Spanish Empire.
The Spanish-American war was closer to the USA opportunistically feasting upon the remains of the fallen empire (The British already overtook the Spanish in terms of power).
It's hard to pinpoint the fall of the Spanish Empire. But it's even harder to point out military action between Spain and Britain (undoubtedly the rising star in the next centuries). There is the big war of Spanish Succession but that's more opportunistic and more like a major civil war that spilled out of Spain and across Europe.
Lots of war between Spain, HRR, France and other parties. But strangely not so much with Britain....
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In both Spanish and British cases, the real enemy the whole time was just a boatload of debt.
The UK was a declining power that had been absolutely gutted by war and owed huge debts to the US that it had accrued to fund the war. I believe Thucydides Trap is more about the situation we have now with the US and China where both are moving from strength to strength.
“The mantle of command”, a FDR biography, goes into some detail on this point. Good read.
I'm not really seeing the USA moving from strength to strength lately TBH. Iran is a disaster, the Navy now has 3 (or 4, depending how you count) failed warship projects in a row, economic growth outside the AI/datacenter boom has dropped to near zero and the internal political climate is polarized to the point of inactivity. Most of its traditional allies have been moving to distance themselves from the USA and worldwide trust in the USA as "leader of the free world" is at the lowest point in decades.
But quite beyond that, I'm just saying that the Thucydides trap is not an iron rule. The first place I looked was a counterexample and I'm sure there have been many more over the centuries.
> No war between the UK and the US was needed.
No war was "needed" to settle who was #1, it was clear that we (the UK) simply couldn't maintain the empire as it was and we definitely couldn't have fought the US.
We went into WW2 the clear naval power in the world, We exited it in the #2 spot utterly broke.
In less than 4 years the US produced enough ships to eclipse our navy and did it while also producing ridiculously vast amounts of equipment for themselves and their allies across every sphere.
No one with a brain in our foreign office would have even contemplated poking that (and realistically while the US has at times been a questionable ally on the whole in that era they were a reliable ally).
In that kind of total war the side with the larger industrial base wins the war of attrition.
It doesn't matter if the enemy sinks ships if your production rate exceeds the sink rate on a sustained basis you win (somewhat related it's also why naval strategists have been sounding the clarion call about the fact that China now makes more than half of all global shipping, the US is somewhere around 1% - those peacetime yards/skilled works transfer over in a war).
The US did that, they won the war (or their part of it) in the factory lines/mines as much as they did on the actual front.
I agree. My point in the GP was that great power transitions are not ALWAYS accompanied by war between the new power and the previous one, as the Thucydides trap argument seems to imply.
War is costly, so (in the absence of bargaining frictions) game theory suggests that an agreement can be reached that leaves both parties better off compared to going to war.
Its not an old idea at all. Its from a 2012 article by Graham Alison followed by a 2017 book on the rise of China specifically that Xi Jinping read and referenced.
Its claimed to be an old idea, but its actually only recently become popular
You are right. Thank you for correcting me. It never ceases to amaze me just how much I can be confidently mistaken about.
If you want to be pedantic, it actually dates back to 1980, in a talk at the Naval War College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap
> Essentially its a very old (~2.5k year) idea that the interaction between an incumbent power and rising "challenger" power inevitably leads to war between the two.
It sounds plausible, but if it is this old there must be a long list of examples. What are some of them?
As LarsDu88 mentioned above, its actually not this old. The idea is recent but is based on an ancient conflict. That is my mistake. The wiki article has interesting info on the examples that the originator saw:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap
Thanks for the list of examples.
It is odd to see a single country being repeated at different times as the "incumbent" power.
The latest example in the list shows "UK and France" as incumbent power and Germany as rising for the 1990s - present.
The US is only listed for the 1940s - 1980s as incumbent, with Japan and Soviet Union as rising.
President Xi of China mentioned it when the US President visited him in May.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/i...
The how of the reference seems important, it's not like he brought it up first apparently
>Xi has referenced Allison’s term before. In a speech in Seattle in 2015, Xi said, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” And in an October 2023 meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Xi said, “The ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.
Do you think Xi's comments are specifically that war is imminent?
utterly repulsive ai slop
Yes, but I liked that the article mentioned how Xi has been saying this for a long time.
I switched the link to Harvard.
Rising power challenges the fading imperial hegemony. In this case, CNY displacing USD.
CNY displacing USD would entail allowing people outside China to buy really significant quantities of CNY-denominated financial products. This would entail CNY/USD changing so CNY is more expensive, because the default currency for financial products currently existing is USD. Which would slap a corresponding huge price increase with 0 increase in quality to all Chinese export. Which would murder Chinese manufacturing export. Which would entail laying off some grand proportion of an industry that employs 5% of the _human_ race. Which is why they're not gonna do that.
Same thing that happened to USD, right? Once the USA stopped having to actually manufacture things to get money, it stopped actually manufacturing things.
China is step by step learning that communism actually sucks and doesn't work.
Unless you can have a super intelligence that can monitor every aspect of everything all the time to ensure optimal decisions. Hmmmm...
I don't think China wants to make the CNY the reserve currency because it would decimate China as a manufacturing hub. They prefer China to be Jakob to the U.S. being Esau. The red lentil soup can be quite bitter.
Is China still rising or already in decline?
their yough unemployment rate sure is rising, it sure ain't great to be young Chinese looking for job now
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/business/china-youth-unem...
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01203/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pedov5/oc...
also there are salary paycuts for people who already have work, my Chinese clients tried this, but not gonna accept it, I will rather lose such client than lower my rate, I am losing money by not increasing my rates over many years already despite huge EU cummulative inflation and EU salaries growth
by my experience visiting country after almost 10 years last year just by looking at salaries, restaurant prices, real estate prices/rent their economy seems to be stagnating in last 10 years, restaurant meal cost pretty much same as 10 years ago, same goes for entry level salaries like waitress, cook and other you can see in street
they are getting stronger overall, though doesn't seem like middle class is benefiting from it, my CN family bought apartment many years ago and they would have problem to sell it for same price, let alone make any profit on it
Yeah, but have you seen their EVs that cost $30,000 and have fold out kitchens and a movie theater in the rear?
I'm not sure that's relevant if you aren't paid so might self to feed yourself.
Also 30k USD is a lot of money everywhere except for in the US
Relative to the US or Europe? I think you know the answer to that.
Relative to the US it’s not a straightforward answer but China is definitely not rising in the way it was a decade ago and has been outpaced by the us
China has a massive demographic problem in the near future (after 2040ish), and it is extremely unlikely (IMO) that it is going to catch up/surpass the US in GDP per capita within the next decades.
But its relative GDP growth has been higher than the US for decades, is higher stil and is probably going to stay higher for years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-growth?country=U...
But the gap between the us and China in terms of GDP has widened in recent years making it look like China will never surpass the us
Never surpass in what exactly?
If you look at absolute numbers (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...), it seems likely that China will surpass the US economy pretty soon (they're a lot more people though, so per-capita is much worse).
Personally I think its most likely that chinese GDP will be larger than US GDP within 2035, but that the median citizen is NOT going to catch up to US standards in the next 50 years.
And their whole society will run into the exact same problems that many western countries are dealing with already (increasing fraction of retirees), so I'd be very careful with extrapolating their currently superior growth rate past 2040 or so.
The answer is really not a clear cut as you assume any longer.
I’ll believe it when I see it, there’s a spread between onshore and offshore yuan exchange rates due to currency manipulation. It becomes harder to manipulate a currency as more of it is created, and AFAIK countries are not loading up on Chinese govt debt, but I may just be unaware?
The USD hegemony isn’t because of oil, it’s because everyone wants dollar-denominated assets. Treasury bonds, US real estate, US equities, etc. Possibly Chinese exports could soak up some of the yuan demand?
China has some internal documents that address the Thucydides Trap with a Chinese idiom, "There are no just wars in the Spring and Autumn Period."
> China has some internal documents
how did you get to see them? that must be a very interesting story.
It depends on what you find interesting. No crazy spy stories but I've been learning Chinese, so I've spent more time looking at things that are only written or said in Chinese.
Project 2025 wasn't really secret but it wasn't in the public consciousness until about a year later https://trends.google.com/explore?q=project%20202&date=today...
China also has a bunch of political philosophy nerds that crank out wonky policy papers. I keep finding references to this one by Wu Bikang, https://www.rmlt.com.cn/2014/0403/253621.shtml
I'm still very bad at Chinese and I don't assume that I understand that paper well, even with translations, but that paper clearly interprets the Thucydides trap very differently from how it's discussed here.
Which of I understand the Wikipedia article correctly would mean it's a euphemism for "there are no just wars"?
Chinese idioms can be notoriously difficult to interpret. From what I've seen, they're often an abbreviation of some passage from a famous text. The listener is expected to know the rest of that text and all the major commentaries that go with it.
I absolutely do not have a solid grasp of the full works of Mencius and I have fairly anemic knowledge of the derivative works but I'm fairly sure it's not just a simple euphemism.
My read of the idiom is that Chinese political philosophers claim that the basis of Western political philosophy is the balance of power between hegemons and the basis of Chinese political philosophy is the concept of the righteous rule/mandate of heaven.
His implication seems to be that Western nations are held together primarily by force whereas the CPC primarily maintains power by serving the people.
I, for one, would appreciate if we could just move on past these incessantly destructive power struggles as humanity.
It's a fundamental attribute of reality. Take it up with mother nature, because power struggles exist everywhere, even in dumb systems with no intelligence. Weak things go away, strong things stay around. Weak things need to become stronger than strong things to displace them.
There's more than enough energy and resources to go around for humans to peacefully coexist "forever", albeit in lesser numbers than today. The civilization meta game is what ruins it, despite our best attempts to regulate that. And a global self destruct button helps massively... until it does not.
Like I replied to the other commenter, it's an unstable equilibrium. Lots of things can stay perfect forever if nothing throws off the delicate balance.
We can focus effort on maintaining this balance...but doing that requires power to be used. And just like that we are back at step one.
We can communally build up trust to such a high level that everyone can act independently to maintain balance, but this naturally creates a situation where the more trust there is, the bigger the payoff for the one who breaks it. Essentially the prisoners dilemma.
Not really, kindness also exists. It is the escape hatch from the evolutionary zero sum game and let's you pick a better equilibrium (bargaining vs pure Nash).
We can just not fight. There is enough room and resources,we can get more of them and build more efficient tech, and we are all more alike than different.
Kindness is an unstable equilibrium unfortunately. Mother nature is totally uninterested in it. Otherwise we would still all be protolife quasi-cells, because consuming other cells and not sharing resources isn't kind.
Maybe you argue that we are human and intelligent, so we can override this inconvenience with a system of our own design. My response would be "Sure, put your guns down and burn them, I won't stop you."
Again, it's an unstable equilibrium. Power on the other hand is dramatically more stable.
Thats your take, I tend to not agree. Nature, with all its balance by destruction, has one approach but we humans can and do things differently in some cases, for our greater benefit.
We don't kill weak links in our population just like mother nature intended and keeps doing left and right everywhere all the time, a good chunk of this forum would not pass those harsh and often random tests yet its/ours added value is non-trivial and surpasses any additional effort by society (at least I like to think that).
'Everything good in this world is kindness'. I have yet to meet a person, situation or story where this would not apply.
Humans can not “move on” from human nature no matter how much people try to will it
It's as much "human nature" as being a slave was once the nature of some (chosen) peoples.
Conflict between humans is much much more nature than slavery was. Just look at animals. Flock animals often have conflicts which others. But none of them have ”slaves” (at least no how humans understand it)
There is a different between a conflict and a war. Humans are uniquely violent and cruel to each other, there is nothing even close in the animal world
You should learn about chimpanzee wars and how dolphins treat tortoises, and about the enslaving ants
Being a slave isn't human nature, but wanting to be a slave owner is. "Human nature" is, more often than not, a shorthand for "the parts of game theory that evolution distilled into humans"
In game theory, cooperation is a dominant strategy and evolves consistently. Slave owners and other injustice committing humans often invoke "human nature" out of trying to cope with their knowledge that it is wrong but whatever trauma or other thing makes them do it anyway, to absolve themselves of agency.
(To be clear, not targeting you personally here, but targeting the rhetoric and fallacy)
Cooperation is an unstable strategy. If everyone else is cooperating and not punishing defectors much, defecting is vastly better for you.
If everyone else is defecting and you can cooperate with a few people, that's slightly better for you. Hence we have high-trust and low-trust societies, gatekeeping, etc.