Comment by JimmyBuckets
5 hours ago
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.
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.