Why big books are important and some thoughts on the supposed "Thucydides Trap"

Article about reading Thucydides: "History of the Peloponnesian War"

(Photo from the historical site of Corinth, Greece. Corinth was pivotal in convincing Sparta to declare war against Athens. This led to a ~20 year war between the Greek city states allied with Sparta and those allied with Athens, called The Peloponnesian war)

In 2020, I finally read “The History of the Peloponnesian War” by the Greek historian, Thucydides (lived around 460 - 400 BC)

I knew only little about the book or its author before I read it. But this was likely an advantage. Sometimes the less you known about something, or someone, a bit controversial the better to draw unbiased opinions. As this has held up for over ~2,000 years, it’s a rare and magnificent piece of writing, but it can be confusing to many potential readers.

First off, in many reviews of this book, and even in the official book introduction, there’s a cautionary warning about how hard it is to understand Thucydides. The sentences are complex with little context at times, making it hard to follow an easy narrative.

To me, the reading of this book and finding it beneficial came easy. On the whole, I found it fast moving and often exciting. The narrative is a world part from the modern New York Times easy to follow narrative style, guiding your emotions with each sentence.

But that makes the journey of discovery in the reading less predictable and more rewarding. If an author has to constantly tell people where to go to get anywhere, your mind will likely never find the very rewarding and interesting places.

What I enjoyed

After some thinking, and reading the book twice, I considered a few reasons why I found this book so fulfilling.

First, in the years before finally getting to Thucydides, I read several books notorious for being books that people who want to seem smart or educated don’t actually read, they only claim they read: (ex: Dostoevsky “The Brothers Karamazov”, Clausewitz “On War”, Wallace “Infinite Jest”).

Take Clausewitz, in my opinion, he’s much harder to get through than Thucydides. But they are also similar. Both are generals writing about events of their time in an attempt to draw conclusions to be applied over a long stretch of time.

I had also read the three foundational Greek Classics: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. These provide a firm foundation of the mindset, philosophical assumptions, and even the phrasings used by Thucydides.

I recommend the The Iliad (big battle for supposed love) and The Odyssey (big journey for supposed love), but the Aeneid (foundation of Rome) only if you have some extra time...

For example, what significance does the Oracle of Delphi hold? The Spartans or Athenians went to the Oracle of Delphi, (a kind of prophet who channeled wisdom from the god Apollo, located in a temple in Delphi), to seek guidance, to attack or defend, it may sound like reading a horoscope.

However, with some appreciation for how the Greeks (and many societies) interacted with religious temples, festivals, and their pantheons of gods, the Oracle of Delphi is more close to how individuals today use therapists, mentors, or career coaches and how companies use consultants and certain experts to make critical decisions.

This linkage in behavior over time with seeking out mystical assurance of our decisions seems very likely, we've just altered who we think holds the widsom. (Another great book on this is the less known book "Violence and the Sacred" by René Girard).

Staring at words for hours to imagine new people, landscapes, and ideas requires some mental endurance. A high threshold for getting bored and incessant interest in learning despite our current image saturated social media society is useful.

I worked for about ~10 years in analytical roles requiring constant learning, looking at information or data to work out explanations to problems by testing out variables that are often proven wrong.

In Thucydides work you find 500+ pages filled with situation reports, post analysis, and scenario testing, a sort of analysts dreamscape. Some of the speeches are long winded (taking up pages). But by and large Thucydides shows condenses the findings, aware the time to think is limited as decisions and actions matter more.

I traveled to Greece and some of the neighboring countries some years before I read the book. This helped because despite what social media and google images and google maps, things feel closer if you've seen them. It's like how a hug with a person you care about can never be fully replaced by pure imagination.

(testing out the Greek hoplite (soldier) helmet at a gift shop in Corinth, Greece. The owner well knew Thucydides, and pronounced his name “THUKIDEEDDEES”)

On style, Thucydides wrote with sentences that don’t always flow together and avoided the romantic sounding narrative style. The work shows an appreciation for the fog of war, no easy answers, and how hard it is to be sure of almost anything.

In my opinion most people are accustomed to reading or watching content which basically guides them along in exactly how they should feel and react.

The writing often comes off as someone trying to express a thought or idea for the first time. Whereas most of the writing we see today is basically mimicking whatever the well established talking points are on a particular topic.

You can often tell when journalists struggle with a new or developing story if it does not easily fit into a prior story or case study example. But over time, firm talking points are established and people act as if there was never any uncertainty before.

Thucydides attempted to describe a war that he saw as the most significant development of that time. The story changes as more information is gathered. And Thucydides often avoids assuming a side. Rather he presents the most plausible explanations and offers the support for each case.

Writing like this is far less common in what most people encounter online or commercially published material, and in especially in what AI will write for a while at least. Most people have a strong preference for easy to flow writing which assumes it has the truth.

One negative side effect of our current moment of apps battling for our full attention is increased exposure writing and thoughts that don’t aim to challenge our thinking. To paraphrase Nietzche in “Beyond Good and Evil”, many people with exceptional thinking or ideas are compelled by other people to fit in and make their ideas more mediocre and thus more palatable to a wider audience.

This reminds of what an engineer at a big international bank once told me: people at his work “don’t want truth, they want something easy to accept...but that’s not truth anymore.”

(A sword and helmet at a museum in Corinth, Greece)

After reading this book twice, I think this book is useful for:

• people interested in a brilliant mind dedicated to finding the root causes of big events.
• people interested in how small or large conflicts develop.
• people interested in the historic influence Greek culture and civilizations has on Europe and later other western influence societies.
• people averse to "group think" or not interested in immediately and completely accepting anything an arbitrarily chosen “expert” says.

(Tile design from museum collection in Corinth, Greece)

A critique of the so called “Thucydides Trap”

The phrase “Thucydides Trap” has been thrown around in media, think tanks, or academic settings since at least 2017, when it was coined by academic Graham Allison. The phrase may have taken hold of the zeitgeist of the foreign policy establishment and Intel community in Washington DC and beyond.

But there are a few big flawed assumptions in what Graham Allison and adherents say:

When people refer to the “Thucydides Trap” they typically do this: insert the United States is the established power (Sparta) and China is the rising power (Athens).

Thucydides outlines his key theme in the opening pages of the book, “what made the war inevitable was the growth of the Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta”.

Thucydides asserts that this underlying fear destabilized the whole relationship amongst Sparta and Athens. This led to the truce being broken and to direct war.

Allison, and many others, loosely apply these positions to our present day, inserting the United States (Sparta) as fearing the rising of China (Athens) and hence susceptible to the same emotional disorientating effects, potentially leading to the breaking of accords, contracts, and deals, and even war.

From my reading, I found this logic misleading. Bluntly stated, the comparison is wrong, the United States is not comparable to Sparta and China is not comparable to Athens. For example, the relative economic growth rates an increased diplomatic activity from the past 25 years is where that comparison mostly stops.

It is more similar to Athens, as it is described by Thucydides. On page 83 of the Penguin Classics version, Athens at the outbreak of the war is described as:

• Heavy reliance on financial tools and debt for their economy.
• An unrivaled naval power (initially).
• Strong dependence on imports for its economy.
• Relying more on innovation than tradition to get ahead.
• Often more idealistic than pragmatic in it’s relationships.

What about that description does not sound like the United States, epecially when compared with China?

China is also more similar to the description of Sparta provided by Thucydides. More inward looking, reliant upon traditional methods, and less often the first to try a new idea or practice but rather to continue the ideas and practices from the past which function properly. Chinese relationships are generally more pragmatic, long-term, and focused on acquired certain gains and mutual benefits.

The Peloponnesian War was about two prominent Greek city states. While different, Athens was more naval, Sparta was more land based, they had many shared linguistic, religious, and economic values. For a modern day comparison with the United States and international conflicts with the ancient Greek city states; it is better to compare the Greek states conflicts with their more distant conflicts they had, like those with the Persian empire.

(ruins of Corinth, Greece)