By Jack Bowers
The narrative of great-power competition relies largely on a realist discourse reflected in the well-known plot of the Thucydides Trap. China, playing Athens, is a rising power, causing fear for the established power, the United States, looking like Sparta. The trust between them is eroded by the newcomer’s growth, the hegemony becomes fearful at its relative decline in power, and war becomes a case of not if, but when. It is a comfortable narrative because, in part, it subscribes to a reductionist, Manichean view of the world. It is the Cold War, Season 2, goodies against baddies, facing off from opposite ends of the dusty main street. It is Chicken Little proclaiming an impending catastrophe, while the crowd makes ever more raucous demands for the United States to hold its ground in the face of increasing threat. Perhaps it is time to rewrite this Hollywood narrative. If China is recast not as Athens, but instead as Sparta, the United States then plays the role of Athens adding a little more analogous nuance to the narrative.
The great-power competition between the United States and China as a binary, zero-sum narrative is both dangerous and unrealistic.[1] By broadening the strategic imagination, however, there are creative, viable alternatives. With a deeper appreciation of the other’s strategic assets, weaknesses, and priorities, informed by their respective histories, the tendency to reduce debate into binaries could be circumvented. For the United States, this would allow for ways of working with China rather than competing with it. The challenge for both China and the United States is to find accommodations, and this requires the constituencies of both nations to re-conceptualize their notions of power and to understand, as all minor parties do, that concessions can actually create opportunities to exercise power.
Avigator Thailand (Shutterstock)
First, though, because the past is not always as neat as we might like, let’s look again at ancient Greece. The Athenians were primarily a trading nation, providing a maritime security envelope for states across the Aegean, while also securing resources for themselves. Over the four decades before the Second Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), Athens had become the regional muscle, extracting payment for the provision of security. Burned by the Persian War fifty years earlier, they gained confidence and prosperity on the back of their victory.[2] Gradually, as alliances became formalized around democracy, trade, and tributes, the Delian League became the Athenian Empire. Democracy, trade, and influence formed a glorious trinity.
Likewise, following their overthrow of British rule, the Americans consolidated their power. Gaining a foothold on the west coast, the United States quickly understood both the trading potential and the geopolitical importance west across the Pacific Ocean. California joined the union in 1850, trade with Japan began in the 1850s, it secured Alaska and Midway in 1867, and trade with China began in 1868 and Korea in 1882; the 19th century saw the United States establish its interests across Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, Wake Island, and the Philippines, competing successfully with Russia, France, Germany, and Great Britain for control of the east.[3]
As the Athenians transformed their prosperity into a tightly controlled corporate empire, they secured influence across the known world. With the backing of the world’s most powerful navy, islands and mainland poleis could outsource their security risks. With courage and humility, Athenian leaders like Cimon showed his people the way, but success also brought greed and arrogance. The Athenians became ruthless in the control they exerted over their client states. They grew wealthier and more powerful than anyone ever dreamed was possible, and many resented their power.[4]
Thucydides records the Athenians’ quagmire in Egypt (461-455 BCE), for example. The Athenians saw a strategic opportunity in assisting a rebellion against the Persian satrapy, but the Athenians understood neither the terrain nor the fight. They lost 200 triremes in the Nile delta region, and then a further fifty from a related misadventure.[5] The rout in Egypt severely depleted Athenian forces at a time when the First Peloponnesian War (460-445 BCE) had already commenced. That they learned nothing from this mistake, and similarly overreached in the Sicilian expedition (413 BCE), is a stark reminder of both the delusion of Athenian exceptionalism and the blindfold of hubris.[6]
A U.S. soldier in Afghanistan (U.S. Army Photo)
Like the Chinese, the Spartans focused more on maintaining territorial security, and most of the Peloponnesian peninsula lay under Spartan control. Their strength, their national pride, and a good deal of their paranoia resulted from being a military regime dependent on an often rebellious population of slaves, known as helots. The helots originated largely from Messenia, a region the Spartans considered their own. Suppression, motivated by fear, and dissent because of authoritarian rule, kept Sparta in a semi-permanent sense of siege. National narratives based on past exploits deluded the Spartans into viewing their state as a noble balance of justice and courage, a country so much more than the sum of its individuals. One’s family owed the state for its good fortune and its safety; allegiance to the state was non-negotiable, and fighting for the state was the highest honour.[7]
One of the repercussions of Sparta’s largely inward-looking view was that it had few friends, and those it had largely reflected Sparta’s sphere of influence. Compared with the dictates of the Athenian Empire, Sparta maintained a looser confederacy of alliances of which less was demanded, and from which less was given.
Although China is clearly more ambitious, offering aid and investment across the Pacific and Africa, the emphasis has been on buying influence rather than extracting power. For example, China maintains diplomatic relations with eight Pacific countries. It also committed US$5.88 billion between 2011-2018, usually in the form of concessional loans for infrastructure. Diplomatic relations are conditional upon recognizing “One China” and not recognizing Taiwan, and countries are encouraged to switch allegiances, as the Solomon Islands did in 2019. Significantly, compared with the United States, China’s relations have tended to be more overtly transactional.[8] China, though, is frequently heavy-handed, punishing countries that resist its coercive narrative, damaging the very relationships it seeks to grow.
The United States sees China as the emerging empire, growing outwards across the Pacific, but it is apt to forget China’s past and to ignore the considerable internal tensions China faces. The Chinese Communist Party has been a paranoid, insecure organization since its beginnings.[9] Its existence depends upon a social contract with its citizens to ensure ongoing stability with the price of authoritarian rule being to provide economic opportunities for all. While the vast majority of the population has prospered under its regime, inequality has risen exponentially between the urbanized east coast and the rural hinterland. Balancing the forces for social liberalization on the coast and economic prosperity inland requires withering complexities. Creating opportunities while managing expectations, allowing freedoms while ensuring security, the Chinese Communist Party must exert its unwavering control while maintaining the fiction that China is a homogenous population willingly governed from Beijing.[10]
At the same time, China’s internal tensions mean its standing on the international stage is precarious. Beyond Tiananmen Square and the virtual police state of Tibet, there is the increasing reliance on the surveillance of its population, recent revelations of re-education camps in Xinjiang, the struggle for Hong Kong, as well as ongoing tensions with Taiwan. These all undermine China’s legitimacy on the international stage. One of the reasons China’s diplomatic relations are so often confined to the transactional is because the Chinese Communist Party’s insecurity will not allow foreign countries to comment on China’s domestic affairs.[11] China is finding it hard to make friends. If it hopes to make and keep allies, and fulfill the agenda Xi Jinping has promised, it must somehow manage these stress points peacefully.
This is China’s Achilles’ heel, and it has important implications for American strategy. For over 150 years, the United States has deepened and strengthened its mercantile and geopolitical interests across the Asia-Pacific region. It has friends in many places. That the United States is a military behemoth is clearly important, but it is the capacity to leverage trade, economic opportunities, and military weight on the back of long-standing alliances across the globe that makes U.S. strategy compellingly effective. Rather than trying to out-muscle China, the United States could exploit China’s internal fragility and lack of friends. This, however, would require the United States to be less an enforcer and more accommodating of its allies. Most challenging of all, by ceasing its undermining of the United Nations, for example, and improving its own human rights record in regard to assassinations, renditions, and domestic incarceration, the United States would be less prone to charges of hypocrisy.[12]
The benefits of genuine cooperation are manifold, most obviously a reduction in tension between two immensely powerful nations, but the United States might need to be content with not always expecting to get its own way. Australia, for example, has been influenced by Great Britain, the United States and China, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Respectively, examples here include preferential trade opportunities with Britain in the first half of the 20th century, the sharing of a communications base between the United States and Australia in the Northern Territory, and the acceptance of “one China” to avoid upsetting Australia’s most significant trading partner.[13] The reality for minor countries is that they must learn to accommodate, to leverage their geopolitical opportunities when they can, to service their alliance partnerships as they must, and to avoid, above all, to be dragged too deeply into binary choices. Countries like Australia must accommodate both China and the United States because they have no alternative.
Avoiding great power competition also requires a realistic U.S. strategic approach to China’s growth. The 2020 forecast of China’s gross domestic product (purchasing power parity) is US$30 trillion against US$22 trillion for the United States; per capita, however, China will only have one third of the United States’ gross domestic product (purchasing power parity), US$21,084 versus US$67,082.[14] Economically, militarily, and politically, China is growing. It is in the interests of the United States to accommodate this growth, rather than try to stymy it. A willingness to cede some of its control in the Pacific, engaging in joint development projects, avoiding the lectures on human rights without addressing its own behaviour, and working with the Chinese on space exploration are just a few options for the United States. If it can find a strategic narrative beyond great power competition, the United States can use its influence without the need to exert its military muscle.
Looking back while stumbling forward, the United States and China could both learn from a richer analysis of the fates of both Sparta and Athens…
Unfortunately, at a time when the United States should be exploiting the strategic advantages of its global relationships, it is retreating clumsily. As Peter Hartcher has noted, “While the United States is trying to work out how to extract its remaining troops from the never-ending war in Afghanistan, Chinese engineers are laying fibre-optic cable through that country.”[15] Both China and the United States have a great deal to gain from peace and economic development in Afghanistan, and their cooperation on infrastructure development could open the door to further opportunities. The Chinese are deploying One Belt One Road initiatives across the world, building partnerships in a uniquely Chinese way.[16] Looking back while stumbling forward, the United States and China could both learn from a richer analysis of the fates of both Sparta and Athens because, as everyone knows, the winner of the Peloponnesian War was not Sparta or Athens, but instead Persia.
Do we read Thucydides for the past, or for the present? Like Athens and Sparta, the United States and China exercise their power very differently from their analogous contemporaries, as well as from each other. In the Internet age, under a welter of information, it is easier to gloss and skim over the details. Close reading takes time—time to read as well is time to think—but it is worth the effort. The supposed Thucydides’ trap is seductive. Graham Allison was acutely aware of this when he wrote Destined for War, but a close reading of Allison’s book shows that Thucydides’ trap was simply a vehicle for a more nuanced view of conflict.[17] Likewise, anyone who reads the whole of Thucydides in detail appreciates that his history is about so much more than great power competition.
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. Power—too little, too much, too closely hoarded, too freely spent—is the trap. The only thing that makes war inevitable is our misunderstanding of the nature of power.
Jack Bowers is Director of Studies for the Military and Defence Studies Program at the Australian War College in Canberra. He is also senior lecturer in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. The views expressed are the author's and do not reflect the official position of the Australian War College, the Australian Department of Defence, or the Australian Government.
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