Thucydides Traps

Neville Morley

Thucydides is having another moment. Donald Trump’s foreign policy has provoked a rash of allusions to a line from the Melian Dialogue: ‘The strong do what they want, the weak suffer what they must.’ The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, referred to it at Davos in January in his lament for the fading of a rules-based order: ‘This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.’ Here we go again, you might say, just as W.H. Auden sat in one of the dives on 52nd Street on 1 September 1939, reflecting on what ‘exiled Thucydides knew’ and ‘analysed … in his book’.

A Thucydidean world is not something to be welcomed. Thucydides’ account of the thirty-year war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE doesn’t deal only with interstate conflict and the brutalities of imperialism; it also takes in a devastating epidemic, social breakdown, polarisation, civil war, catastrophic failures in the workings of democracy and an attempted oligarchic coup. One of the reasons I’m struggling to finish writing a book on Thucydides and contemporary politics is that Stuff Keeps Happening – my original plan, back in 2019, didn’t even have a chapter on the plague. I wrote the first draft of this piece after the US assault on Venezuela, when Trump was threatening Greenland, before the US and Israel attacked Iran.

Thucydides primed his readers to look for parallels. His hope was that his work would be found useful by those wishing to understand present and future events, which, humans being human, tend to resemble those of the past. There is a centuries-long tradition of identifying analogies between his account and the present, from the wars of the Italian city-states to the wars of religion to the French Revolution to the American Civil War to the First World War.

‘A highly knowledgeable member of the English parliament remarked that there was no question dealt with in its chambers upon which Thucydides’ light could not be brought to bear,’ Pierre-Charles Lévesque wrote in the introduction to his 1795 translation. The claim has been much repeated, even if the parliamentary record shows only infrequent references to Thucydides through the 19th and 20th centuries. Thucydides is often read these days as a pioneering political theorist, who identified the normative principles that drive interstate relations and political life. Most of the general statements are made by characters in Thucydides’ work, often devious and untrustworthy types, rather than by the author himself, but that seems less important than their rhetorical force (especially in tidied-up translations rather than Thucydides’ convoluted prose) and their apparent insight.

The most prominent and frequently invoked are those that echo the tenets of ‘realism’. The universal motives of ‘fear, honour and interest’ are cited by some Athenians to argue that anyone else would have established an empire like them if they could; and the absence of an effective international order to constrain the rule of the stronger – ‘justice is relevant only between equals in power’ – is likewise expounded by Athenians to persuade a small neutral city to do the sensible thing and surrender. For some modern readers, this is just the way the world is, and only naive idealists think any different.

The alternative argument – often accompanied by the insinuation that the realists have read only the Melian Dialogue and not what happened afterwards – is that Thucydides intended to depict the hubris of imperialist powers and the way it led them into disastrous miscalculations. Using the Athenians at Melos as sock puppets isn’t an endorsement of their claims, when that mindset led them to defeat at Syracuse.

What was distinctive about Carney’s Davos speech was not so much his take on the aphorism as the fact that a head of government was name-checking Thucydides. Figures like Trump – or Netanyahu, or Putin – are frequently characterised as reflecting a Thucydidean/Athenian ‘might makes right’ worldview, but they don’t mention him directly. Explicit engagement with Thucydides is something for their shadowy advisers: Stephen Miller, Michael Anton, Steve Bannon. In the George W. Bush era, Thucydides was the favourite text of the neocons, and Colin Powell displayed a quotation – unfortunately a fake quotation – in his office. Henry Kissinger was a fan from his college days.

In Britain, Boris Johnson advertised his admiration for Pericles – the Athenian leader for whom Thucydides is our key contemporary source, who can be idealised (with a bit of squinting) as an inspirational leader. It was Dominic Cummings who had long claimed Thucydides as inspiration and model, setting up ‘cool Thucydidean courage to face reality’ as a key attribute for understanding the world, and who continues to quote him in rambling blog posts on British politics.

References to the so-called Thucydides Trap (the risk of conflict between an established and a rising power), for example by Obama, don’t really count, as they’re concerned with an idea that exploits Thucydides’ reputation rather than engages with his work (though the concept has been popular in online commentary as an explanation not just for US-China relations but also Russia-Nato, China-India, India-Pakistan and Bitcoin).

But there are precedents for Carney’s speech. ‘Shall there be a common standard of right and privilege for all peoples and nations,’ Woodrow Wilson asked in 1918, ‘or shall the strong do as they will and the weak suffer without redress?’ The Thucydidean echo – depicting a worldview that needs to be replaced by the rule of law – is clear.

And in 2015, the election of Malcolm Turnbull in Australia was hailed as a restoration of calm and sanity, in part because he quoted Thucydides a lot, not as a ‘might makes right’ aggressor but as a calm, rational analyst. ‘How strange it is to see the prime minister on the TV using words of more than one syllable,’ remarked the cartoonist First Dog on the Moon. Turnbull isn’t depicted, but his words come from the side of the panel, addressed to a crowd of reporters: ‘Thucydides has never heard of you either.’