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​They’re Reading Thucydides in the White House:    Does That Mean that War with China is Inevitable?

6/27/2017

7 Comments

 


They are reading Thucydides in the White House, or so Politico informs us.  Who? Trump? More likely Steve Bannon and pals  are reading  Graham Allison’s new book  Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?  in which he argues “When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the most likely outcome is war..”  Indeed, we are told,  Thucydides showed that in such circumstances, war might be inevitable. If policy makers believe that, we are indeed in a trap of self-fulfilling expectations.   Allison’s core idea depends on the translation of one sentence in Thucydides, (1.23.6), the one highlighted in the promotion of his book on  the Belfer Center at Harvard’s  Kennedy School  web site:“It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this instilled in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”Are the strategy wizards of the White House reading that   sentence and concluding war with China is inevitable?It’s perfect for Twitter-brains, but, look, if the strategists in the White House decide that war is inevitable, it will be inevitable. Can’t you hear them, “Since it is inevitable, why waste time and energy on negotiations? Forget diplomacy. Let’s get it over with war while we still have the lead in power. “
 
So it’s important to get that little sentence of Thucydides right.
Otherwise people die.
 
If we look closely at the Greek, we can see that Thucydides was not putting forth the idea of inevitability, “ in order to exculpate from responsibility the Athenian statesman Pericles, whom he much admired,“ as followers of Donald Kagan claim.  In fact, he wasn’t  arguing that the war was inevitable in any rigorous sense. He was not propounding a Law of History. but exploring the psychology of decision making.
That is clear, first off, from his choice of words. It would have been easy enough for Thucydides to assert inevitability, if that were what he meant. He could have used the word aphykton, inescapable.  Instead he chose a verb with  a wide range of meaning, from exert psychological pressure on someone , to apply physical force. It’s related to words for the drives for food, sex etc. that are part of the Greeks’ understanding human nature.  It’s the right word to choose when exploring the powerful, but not unavoidable effects of fear in human affairs.
What’s more, Thucydides’ Greek keeps away from any simple assertion that the Spartans were compelled to wage war. His phrasing is more complex and more cautious and again ambiguous. He adds a preposition and uses a grammatical construction (infinitive with the definite  article the)  in which wage war is the object of the preposition, not a free standing verb.  The Spartans, Thucydides says, were driven, into or towards the waging of war. That grammatical construction is the sort of expression one might well use when a boss compels subordinates or a master forces  slaves to do what they would not choose to do (cf. Thucydides 2.75.3). But, of course, workers can shirk their duties and slaves can run away.  The phrasing doesn’t entail inevitability.
A close reading of the Greek, then, doesn’t come out where Allison would like. The difference may seem a tiny one, but it’s important to get it right.  Otherwise, war becomes more likely,and people more likely to die
A reliable translation of the sentence would preserve the range of possible meaning of Thucydides’ word choice, for example “... the Athenians by becoming great and causing fear drove the Spartans towards waging war.”
 
The phrasing of Thucydides’ Greek, .then, shows that he was not propounding a law of history or tweeting an opinion, but raising questions about how policy is best formulated I situations where a change in power relationships engenders fear in one of the parties.   
One can’t answer those questions by stopping here just a a dozen pages into the text, and putting it under the philologist’s equivalent of an electron microscope.  Once one sees the range of possible meanings in this passage, one must read on
Try that and a careful literary strategy emerges that brings the reader to Sparta at the time of the crucial debate  (chs 68 – 87) on whether to go to war or not. Was there still any alternative to war? Of course there was. Cautious, intelligent King Archidamus laid out exactly such an approach in his speech:
Deliberate therefore of this a great while as of a matter of great importance .... Consider before you enter how unexpected the chances of war be .... (1.78, tr. Thomas Hobbes)
 
 Archidamus’ approach was narrowly rejected  after being assailed byby the rabble-rousing words of his fire-brand opponent, Sthenelaidas. .
The alert reader can detect just under the surface of this debate the fear that no red-blooded warrior wants to admit, but was there, nonetheless, pushing Sparta toward war. It was a powerful force, but Sparta still had a choice.  Even after the vote in Sparta war was not inevitable; there were still ways out, if sufficient political will could be mustered to try them.
So, read on, White House strategists and Harvard savants. Push ahead, mighty policy wizards, Don’t stop with the alleged assertion of inevitability, and, for heaven’s sake, don’t be stampeded by the growth of Chinese power; don’t let rabble rousing fire-brands push you into war. We still have the vestiges of the incredible shrinking State Department; use it before it disappears entirely. .
But, above all, keep reading Thucydides, carefully. Get it right. Otherwise, people die.
 
--
Several Thucydideans have helped me think through these issues. I am especially grateful to Donald Lateiner, Hunter Rawlings, Daniel Tompkins. They may not agree with me, but they sure have helped me think.
 


7 Comments
don lateiner
6/28/2017 11:16:14 am

I agree with Bob, and I thank him for pulling various threads together. I will add only a couple of minor points:
1. Thucydides (1.23.6) in his Greek emphasizes that Athenian growth of power created alarming fear in the Lakedaimonians and that fear forced them to into war--invading Plataiai and Attica (2.2, 8, 12). I.e., NO inevitability of war but either a correct or mistaken Lak. state of mind --fostered by the less than lucid Spartiate Sthenilaidas--pushed those non-strategists into thinking war now to be their best interest.
2. Notice Thuc's hegoumai, "I think," existimo, suggesting a lack of certainty or an uncommon opinion. Editorial hegoumai is unexpectedly rare in THuc.--you may be surprised to hear that this one is unique; the 8 others occur in (other men's) included speeches.
3.There is a slight anacoluthon, of a familiar Thucydidean sort:
I think the prophasis (truest reason/cause) was the Athenians' growing great [then that growth becomes the subject of anankasai] and that increasing [subjective, psychological] alarm of the Laks pushed them into/toward fighting [a war].
4. WH Forbes' 1895 Comm. on Thuc. 1 seems to get this right. He has a four page discussion of Thuc. anacolutha in his ante-grammatical age.
5. Athenian growth was already beyond Lak. control (and they did try for over a century). Lak. fear was but as Thuc. makes clear it took Megarians, Korinthians, other Peloponnesians, and Spartan fear-mongers to rouse sufficiently the sluggish Lak. war machine.

Point 3 allows us to clarify that the Athenians were doing what most states do, maximizing their position in the world, while the Laks.' anxiety/fear/alarm caused them to start the war, but even so, Thuc. shows us in the debates of book 1 and the efforts of early book 2 that it was no small thing (Thucydidean litotes) to pressure them into what Arkhidamos and others saw would be nasty, brutish, and long.

Reply
Rush Rehm
6/29/2017 01:14:19 am

Thanks, Bob, and Don too. Useful, relevant, persuasive. I recall a similar misuse of Thucydides by the usual suspects to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq, another recent 'joyful noise unto the land.'

Reply
Richard McKim
6/29/2017 04:00:50 pm

Thanks for this, Bob -- a worthy addendum to your lifelong project of bringing Thucydides to bear on American foreign policy. I'm sympathetic to your point but feel you may be underestimating the force of T's verb anankesai, which you render as "driven", arguing that it doesn't entail inevitability. Maybe I'm over-influenced by the Presocratic/Aeschylean force of the noun form ananke -- ironclad cosmic necessity -- but the verb does seem to me stronger than you allow. T appears to be saying that, while Sparta (& Athens) put forward pretexts for war that made it appear to be a rational decision among options, it really wasn't rational or optional at all, but forced on them by the primitive (and irresistible?) power of Sparta's fear.

I think you could grant this and still make your point. Even on my strong reading of the verb, war by T's account is only inevitable for America IF America (like Sparta) is forced into it by fear. Once fear takes hold, necessity kicks in, but war isn't inevitable period in such situations, as Bannon & co. seem to conclude. So why are they such scaredy-cats?

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Greg Bathon
6/30/2017 12:44:12 pm

Morning, Bob –

You make your point, but Allison's thesis doesn't stand or fall on the nuances of translation. The Athenians and Spartans did, indeed fight a long and debilitating war, and it's reasonable to believe they did it because Athens was eating away at the base of Spartan power.

The core argument, and he offers sixteen examples in the last 500 years when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, is that the "resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception."

But the Chinese don't need to go to war with us. They play the long game, and right now their adversary is – read Tom Friedman on the TPP in this morning's Times – "a sucker for flattery, an ignorant ideologue who rips up a treaty he hasn't even read, a made for television negotiator who throws his best leverage out the window before he even sits down at the table."

We lose by default.

Reply
Nick Maki
7/7/2017 12:10:35 pm

This is an important discussion you've started, Bob! Regardless of how we parse the Greek, we might still take a wider view of the situation Thucydides presents: without doubt, the crux of the decision for war (whether necessary or not), as he would have it, was the fear present in the hearts of the Spartans.

In our present case, I don't know if it matters so much what conclusions Bannon and the gang draw from and actually believe about a particular ancient conflict, but rather what efficacy Thucydides shows certain political tactics to have. For an administration that has shown no aversion toward fear-mongering and other manipulations of public opinion in order to press their agenda, the way Thucydides presents Sparta's case only verifies that this is a valid strategy.

In all likelihood, the lessons that the White House is expecting to find in Thucydides aren't about which course of action to pursue, but rather how to sell it to the rest of us.

Reply
Siley link
7/17/2017 08:20:42 am

Useful, relevant, persuasive. I recall a similar misuse of Thucydides by the usual suspects to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq, another recent 'joyful noise unto the land.

Reply
Shirley M link
1/16/2021 03:21:08 am

Thanks ffor a great read

Reply



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