President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
To date, Australia has enjoyed the benefit of a hedging strategy that embraces the economic prosperity of a close trading relationship with China while maintaining a close security alliance with the U.S. This strategy has been tested recently and the tension between values and interests requires focused attention. If there was previously any doubt on where that pendulum would swing, it is now firmly answered in the announcement of AUKUS, an Australian, U.K. and U.S. security partnership.
This book responds to the recent upswing in interest in Thucydides in international relations and public circles, and seeks to get international relations scholars more engaged in the nuances of Thucydides. It presents common assumptions made from Thucydides’ text, demonstrates how the reality of the situation in Thucydides’ text and in Greece at the time was more complicated, and gives readers some take-aways to consider when contemplating how to apply the lessons of Thucydides. Speaking directly to international relations scholarship and theory in a way that few classical scholars would, the work is good for those who want a book that addresses the specific ways in which international relations scholars and the media interpret Thucydides. However, the work's simplifications and omissions impair its overall impact.
Sthenelaidas’ role wasn’t to be a general in war, but to be an orator in the preamble. It was Archidamus whose role was to play the general. On first blush, their contrasting rhetorical styles point to two different strategies for war. Ultimately, however, they push in the same direction. There is a unity of opposites. Their rhetorical style is different, but they need each other to launch Sparta in its great power rivalry.
The works of Thucydides, Sun-tzu, and Clausewitz comprise the lodestone of strategic studies. Yet, international law is conspicuously absent in all three of their works. This feature creates a potential blindspot for any strategist who narrowly relies upon the classical trilogy of strategic thought for understanding strategic decision-making processes and interactions in contemporary conditions.
Thucydides offers many enduring insights for scholars and policymakers. New tensions emerge as great powers search for new allies and try to hold on to old ones. Once begun in earnest, great power competitions are likely to endure for decades, because of the resources great powers possess. Those resources make it highly likely conflict comes with an often terrible cost for the victor and for the vanquished.
While war between the United States and China is a possibility, a larger and more refined lesson could be gleaned from Thucydides’ ancient text. In an era of great power competition, The Peloponnesian War provides one of the first nearly complete histories of a conflict that included complex alliances, ideologically opposing views, civil discord, diplomacy, total war, and human struggle. It provides examples of how the choices made by Athenian and Spartan leaders mattered in determining whether they avoided war or led their countries into conflict. Most importantly, The Peloponnesian War offers strategists and policymakers invaluable insights into the nature and character of competition between two great powers and makes clear the importance of strategic options that avoid ill-conceived conflict.
As Thucydides showed so clearly, the real trap is power itself. Insufficient power leaves one open to being exploited, or worse; more power actually makes power harder to control, and it leaves one vulnerable to being undermined. That is the nature of power. Thucydides was right about fear, honour, and interest being the motivators for power.
Thucydides’ history is the record of man’s interactions with other men, where women are only considered when they are obstacles or dividends and are otherwise deemed irrelevant. The Peloponnesian War therefore establishes a form of historiographical patriarchy by representing history purely through a male perspective.
A growing distrust gradually replaced that love. More people view U.S. power as a major threat, and allies are increasingly uncertain the U.S. will keep its commitments. This is a trend going back three decades. As a result, regardless of who is President in January 2021, the central theme for the next National Security Strategy should focus on regaining U.S. honor.
Professor Harper has produced a wonderful case study that demands a general rethinking of how we view the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It turns much of the earlier views on Rome’s decline into surface explanations and places the chance happenings of nature in a driver’s seat that we can barely comprehend. It should also give us pause in how we think about the future.
One cannot go far wrong by employing Thucydides as a foundation for any model, as General George Marshall reminded us. But Marshall surely did not mean for policymakers to end their studies with the Peloponnesian War. Rather, Thucydides is but a starting point for a much wider historical study aimed at revealing the true nature of strategic rivalries and the character of their ensuing conflicts.
Must the rise of power in China and the fear it causes in America lead to war? Kori Schake’s new work, Safe Passage: The Transition From British To American Hegemony, probes this question, albeit obliquely, via an inquest into why the passage of power from Great Britain to the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth century was pacific and whether such passage is repeatable. What emerges from this eminently readable, incisively argued, and keenly erudite history is how precarious such passage was: a contingently calm transition, only tranquil because universal ideals mollified the augured storm.
The ‘Thucydides Trap' is a term coined by Harvard professor Graham Allison to ostensibly describe the tensions and conflict that occur when an existing great power is confronted with a rising state. According to Allison, as the new power rises, the two are more likely to engage in violent conflict as the new power displaces the old. He cites sixteen cases of power transition since the late 15th Century, of which twelve resulted in war between the two powers. Allison also cites Thucydides, and in particular the ancient Athenian author’s conclusion that the war between Athens and Sparta, chronicled in his History of the Peloponnesian War, began "because they [the Spartans] were afraid of the further growth of Athenian power.”
Thucydides, who authored the definitive account of the Peloponnesian War, started writing as soon as the conflict began, “...believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.” His account has also proved valuable for evaluating ensuing conflicts through to the present day. As Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote, the Peloponnesian War showed that “strategic problems remain the same, though affected by tactical difficulties peculiar to each age.” The Athenian invasion of Sicily and the American experience in Iraq were not identical, but no two wars ever are. Instead, we must look at the overarching effects the military campaigns had on political objectives.
The inability or unwillingness to recognize defeat and its implications resulted in both greater material losses and amplified the strategic consequences for inevitable failures. Strategy is a human endeavor, and prospect theory offers unique insights into another dimension of the human face of war, providing a framework for examination of paradoxical decision making and human error in strategy and tactics.
The enduring importance of The History of the Peloponnesian War resides in its ability to prepare the reader to recognise historical patterns hidden in chaos regarding the human element in war. Using the model of historical study proposed by Sir Michael Howard, the span of Thucydides’ account allows the reader to study war in width and examine continuities, trends, and patterns in human behaviour in war. By incorporating both chronological events and the speeches of key decision makers into his argument, Thucydides provides an opportunity to study in depth the chaos and uncertainty inherent in war. Finally, by expanding his analysis to include the cultures of the societies participating in the conflict, Thucydides enables the reader to study the context within which the war was fought.
Reviewing the work of scholars who have examined the Peloponnesian War gives grounds for questioning not only Thucydides’s purportedly dispassionate style, but also one of his most well-known conclusions: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.”
Ultimately, Thucydides’ enduring relevance lies in the fact that he forces us to wrestle with the notion that war, as a contest for power, strips bare human nature under the pressure of conflict—and the results are not appealing. The Peloponnesian War shows how strategic perceptions based on the innately human frailties of fear, honour, and interest lead a state to war. Thucydides then warns us that during conflict a state’s collective morality can decline under the strain of prolonged war based on the choices it makes. He helps us understand that creating a winning strategy is all about these choices, which are shaped by a state’s strategic and military culture.
