It’s ancient Greece, 430 BC or so when gods and goddesses didn’t care too much about clothes. After suffering some major damage from a Persian invasion almost 50 years before that, Athens has been running on the fast lane, building triremes (ships), stacking silver from the Laurion mines, and generally strutting around like the new kid who had just invented democracy, philosophy, and really good olive oil.
The Parthenon, once destroyed by the Persians, was rebuilt and served the dual purpose of temple and treasury for the Delian League. As Athens grew from strength to strength, its allies became subordinates and the the Athenian Empire with a powerful navy came into being. The extravagance of Athens was greeted by the frugal Spartans with suspicion and disgust. Sparta used to be big brother but with the rise of the Athenians, the two became convincing threats to each other.
A major maritime power at that time, Athens had a powerful navy. Sparta, meanwhile, is the grizzled veteran in the corner. All abs and spears, it was accustomed to being the undisputed champ of the Peloponnese with its nearly invincible army but very little in the way of a navy.
Thucydides, the original war nerd and historian, watched the whole thing and dropped the line that Graham Allison would later turn into a bestseller: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
The Thucydides Trap is born. Not a literal trap with spikes and ropes (the Greeks had enough of those already), but a structural one. When a rising power starts flexing and the established power starts sweating, the odds of somebody throwing the first punch skyrocket. Allison crunched the numbers. 16 times in the last five hundred years a rising power met a ruling one. Twelve of those ended in war. Scary.
Graham Allison loves pointing out that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. In the 19th century, a rising Germany and nervous Britain turned Europe into a powder keg. Spain vs. Portugal, Japan vs. Russia, the Ottomans vs. Arabs, Europeans, pretty much everyone … they all stumbled into the same trap.
I won’t make any predictions with regards to the current rivalry between the superpower and its strongest Asian rival. Perhaps in another article. Here, I’ll just go into a bit of Greek history (which I enjoy) and see if you can spot any parallels. With due respect to Mr Allison, I don’t think the comparison is fair.
The Spartans first declared war against Athens in 446 BC, just as the opulent Parthenon was still under construction. Why? Put simply, it was the culmination of decades of rising tension, a series of very specific diplomatic crises, and Sparta’s calculation that a land war was the only way to check Athens before it became unstoppable. So are these fears valid? Imagine you’re doing business on an island and your rival has ships while you don’t. Sparta was basically a land-based power. Athens was a democratic maritime power and it had grown so influential that its former Delian allies had become its client states. In contrast, Sparta practised slavery, had a fearsome hoplite infantry and it had never managed to truly subjugate its Peloponnesian allies. Like a seesaw, the Athenian Empire was rising, Peloponnese was declining.
Reluctant to go to war, the Athenians offered a truce. Or so it seemed. After the Spartan army retreated, the Athenian army and navy went beyond the borders of their empire, occupying smaller city states next to Sparta over the next decade or so. The writing was on the wall. There is no way those moves could be interpreted as friendly.
Nevertheless, the Spartans chose to dig in, taking a defensive position. The sheer size of the Athenian navy was intimidating. Their wealth and a well-developed monetary system had helped the Athenians grow into an economic power that allowed it to develop financially, militarily and artistically. The Spartans in contrast, had no financial system. Its army was legendary but tiny in comparison.
It might seem like the Spartans were dictators, but in 432 BC, members of the Peloponnesian League (of which Sparta was the leader) sounded the alarm and wanted Sparta to do something. It was decided that as long as Athens pretended to be peaceful while it closed in on the League, negotiation was not possible. Athens denied its ambitions (sounds familiar?) but its actions said something else.
Led by Spartan forces, the Peloponnesians amassed a force of 60,000 and marched into Attica – Athens’ hinterland. The size of the allied forces surprised Pericles. As the army approached, he ordered the entire countryside to be evacuated. He then packed everyone into the city of Athens, sheltered behind its high walls to which the Spartan army had no answer.
The port of Piraeus served as the trapped Athenians’ sole resupply route, taking advantage of the fact that the Spartans did not have much of a navy. The Athenians could hold out indefinitely this way, or so they thought. Unable to get the Athenians out from their fortress and being no match for them at sea, the Spartans gave up and left. But as fate would have it, the Spartan’s attempted invasion was not totally to no avail. Athens was only capable of holding 100,000 inhabitants. With the rest of the state squeezed into the fortified city, the population swelled to over 300,000. The sewage system was unable to cope. The worst that could happen happened. Athens was hit by a terrible plague. One third of the population was wiped out and Pericles himself died in the epidemic.
Athens was devastated by the plague and the damaging effects remained long after it had passed. New leaders who took over from Pericles started waging random battles all over the region. The empire started to break up. The Athenian Empires treasury was gradually being depleted and many Athenians refused to accept a change in lifestyle. The city was soon close to bankruptcy and there was no way that it could afford to fight another war. In a remarkable twist, peace was ensured when the Athenian army captured 120 Spartans and held them hostage. The Spartans then signed a peace treaty. It seemed like good news for the citizens of Sparta and Athens, but their allies were worried. Client states under Athenian rule wanted to break free. They didn’t want to support the Athenian’s lavish lifestyle and expected Sparta to liberate them. The signing of the peace treaty meant that Athens would still have a grip on them.
Then, a colourful character entered the scene and he would start another storm. His name was Alcibiades. Raised by the late Pericles, he was talented, well-educated and a great orator. Ambitious and aggressive, he was keen on attacking Sparta and tried to find some way around the peace treaty by forming alliances with Sparta’s neighbours.
The Spartans saw through the sneaky move and fought fiercely over control of Mantinea in 418 BC. The Athenians lost. Alcibiades survived and over the next couple of years, set out to launch a full scale attack on Syracuse, an ally of Sparta on the island of Sicily 800 miles away! General Nicias was opposed to the idea. He felt that they had to settle their domestic problems before setting off on another war. But Alcibiades’ fiery rhetoric won the day. Nicias was outvoted in Athens’ democratic system. The Athenian armada set sail in 415 BC. Meanwhile, statues of the god Hermes all over the city were vandalised. Witnesses blamed Alcibiades, but he had already left on his mission to Syracuse, leaving the council to try him in absentia. The court in Athens found Alcibiades guilty of sacrilege and called him back to face punishment. Alcibiades was indignant. He knew that even with all his wit, he could not have defended himself. So he did the unthinkable – he defected to Sparta!
The Spartans welcomed the high ranking defector and Alcibiades, being the chameleon that he was, was able to blend in completely with the Spartan way of life. Once the most loved Athenian, he quickly became the most loved Spartan. Meanwhile, Nicias became the reluctant commander of Athens’ formidable fleet. The Athenian troops managed to overrun Syracuse and turn its many buildings into rubble. Syracuse fell and came under Athens control.
Syracuse was not Spartan territory. The Spartans didn’t want to get involved, but speaking on the Spartan side now, Alcibiades persuaded them to reinforce their allies and liberate Syracuse from Athens. The Spartans arrived in Syracuse to find the Syracuse resistance in complete disarray. The seasoned Spartans quickly trained and organised them and within a year, Syracuse launched a counter-offensive against the occupying Athenians. The reluctant commander Nicias was killed and Athenian troops suffered a humiliating defeat. Alcibiades had a first taste of revenge but he wanted more. He wanted to destroy his former home – Athens.
Goaded by Alcibiades, the Spartans tightened the noose around Athens by erecting a garrison just outside the city, blocking its land routes. With most of its navy and ships destroyed in the battle at Syracuse, Athens was barely able to survive on supplies delivered by sea. Meanwhile, Sparta built up its navy and put it under the command of Admiral Lysander. They finally introduced a monetary system and colluded with Persia. Unable to get any real support from Persia, Sparta also wooed city states in the Athenian Empire. Thebes and Corinth saw this alliance as an opportunity to be liberated from Athens. The newly strengthened Spartan navy blocked the Athenian harbour at Piraeus and starved the people. They then attacked Athens relentlessly.
Thanks to Alcibiades, Athens would fall to the Spartans in 404 BC. The Peloponnesian war was over with Spartan victory – or so it seemed. One would expect all Athenians to be slaughtered or enslaved, but Sparta did not do that. Instead, they allowed Athenians self-rule, albeit under a Spartan system of oligarchy. A council called the 30 Tyrants overlooked every move of the Athenian government.
That turned out to be a big mistake. Given virtually unlimited authority, the 30 Tyrants went on a rampage, killing and torturing all who were suspected of plotting a rebellion. The hedonistic lifestyle of the Athenians was regarded as decadent by the Spartans. They expected every city under them to practise their system of austerity, laconism, social engineering and class distinction. Spartan society was divided into 3 classes – the elite warrior class, the independent craftsmen and farmers and lastly, the Helots or slaves who tilled the land.
Victorious Sparta extended its influence on the Athenian Empire, imposing their values and system on them. It has been reported that a basic Spartan dish was a black broth made from pigs’ legs and blood seasoned with salt and vinegar. Spartan austerity, inflexibility, the Draconian system and probably their cuisine as well, did not appeal to the rest of Greece. Under Sparta, nobody could question authority or exercise his creativity. Art was deemed frivolous and there was no place in Spartan society for the weak.
Used to freedom, democracy and the good life, Athenians were soon driven to rebel. Just one year after Athens fell in 403 BC, the Athenians started a rebellion that successfully toppled the 30 Tyrants. The states of Thebes and Corinth also embarked on the path of rebellion, put off by Sparta’s air of superiority and totalitarianism. In 371 BC, the Spartan army was defeated in Leuctra by the allied forces. Then, helped by Thebes, the Helots broke free from their Spartan masters and founded a new state, Messene, pushing the Spartans further back.
For many generations, Sparta had enslaved the Helots and depended on them to provide agricultural produce while their own men joined the army. The independence of the Helots dealt a huge blow to Sparta’s ability to be self-sufficient. Meanwhile, Sparta’s process of weeding out the weak and setting rules for procreation caused the population to dwindle. Detecting weakness, Thebes rebelled. In 362 BC, the Theban army met the Spartans at Mantinea. To the surprise of everyone, the Spartans did not learn from their mistakes and used the same tactics that lost them the battle at Leuctra earlier. Not surprisingly, they lost the battle again and retreated to a tiny corner of their island, becoming a living museum, never to exert its influence on Peloponnese again. Both Athens and Sparta thought they had the best system and for a while, both seemed to work. As the Chinese saying goes, there cannot be two tigers on the same mountain – which shows that there is nothing scholarly about Thucydides’ Trap. Who won? Nobody.
Athens and Thebes regained some of their former glory after the fall of Sparta, but they were later absorbed into Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire, then came the Roman Empire. With the rise of Christianity, the Greek gods became theological fossils. In the final decade of the 6th century AD, the Parthenon was converted into a Christian pilgrimage site dedicated to the Virgin Mary. After the Ottoman conquest, it was turned into a mosque in the early 1460s. On 26 September 1687, an Ottoman ammunition dump inside the building was ignited by Venetian bombardment. The resulting explosion severely damaged the Parthenon and its sculptures. From 1800 to 1803, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin removed some of the surviving sculptures with the alleged permission of the Ottoman Empire. These sculptures, now known as the Elgin Marbles or the Parthenon Marbles, were sold in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they are now displayed. Negotiations are underway, but who knows when the British will return them?
When the Greeks regained independence in 1832, the mosque was quickly demolished. Today’s Acropolis stands proudly against the Athenian skyline both day and night. Athens or Sparta? There is no question as to which city state represents ancient Greece best. The apparent opulence and hedonism of the Athenians left their descendants with something they can be proud of. Restoring the Parthenon may be only a symbolic attempt to restore their former pride and glory, but what is Sparta’s legacy?
The pragmatic Spartans did not build any great structures. Nor were they famous for artists and philosophers. Their buildings were purely functional as they did not fuss with aesthetics. Hence, there is no equivalent of the Acropolis or the Parthenon in Sparta. Though they were once as powerful as Athens, their glorious military achievements had not been captured in any concrete form even though their system has been studied and adopted by the likes of Napoleon and Hitler. In contrast, the “frivolous” art, the “useless” culture and even the messy democracy of the Athenians exude charm and elegance. They have survived and are being admired till this day.
As I strolled among the magnificent ruins on this hill on that cold, sunny winter morning with my little guy, I could imagine the ideals which the Athenians held so close to their hearts. I can also understand how socialism and indiscriminate spending could take root in this society and how imposing austerity measures can incite violent protests and passionate graffiti. While those of us who are doing well at the moment lecture the Greeks on what they should or should not do, we should also realise that their current predicament is just one brief moment in history. Stunning prosperity and impressive GDP notwithstanding, we may not look so glorious when travellers in the future stumble upon our legacy.
Back to the question on Thucydides Trap, the first person to warn of it in the current stand-off was not Xi Jinping or Graham Allison. It was Deng Xiaoping.
“韬光养晦”的核心内涵
邓小平提出的“二十八字方针”为：“冷静观察，稳住阵脚，沉着应付，韬光养晦，善于守拙，决不当头，有所作为”。
这一方针具体体现在对美关系上的逻辑为：
- 不当头： 避免在国际事务中与美国争夺领导权，不承担超出自身实力的国际责任。
- 守拙： 隐藏实力，保持低调，不引起西方世界的恐慌和警觉。
- 有所作为： 核心是把中国自己的事情办好，在国际上以务实合作求发展。
Deng Xiaoping was one step ahead, anticipating Thucydides Trap long before China’s rise. Fortunately or unfortunately, 韬光养晦 has been translated as “hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time”. Some say that if today’s leaders had followed Deng Xiaoping’s advice, there would be no second cold war today. Some say that Deng Xiaoping was only buying time for China.
