Is Thucydides in the Strategic Thinking of America and China?
PHOTO: Mosaic of Thucydides from Jerash, Jordan. Roman 3rd century. Public Domain.
By Evaggelos Vallianatos
Prologue
The Washington consensus about China mirrors the misleading reading of Thucydides. That is, both America and China operate under “the Thucydides Trap.” This is to say that once an emerging great power (China) spoils the balance of planetary power already enjoyed by a hegemon (America), conflict or war is almost inevitable between the emerging superpower and the planetary hegemon.
Light from Thucydides
However, no trap or confusion comes from reading Thucydides. Only light and valuable political theory and insights emerge from this great historian. Even a cursory examination of Thucydides in his time, helps us understand the twenty-first century dangerous games of who’s first, America or China?
Thucydides, c. 460 – 400 BCE, was a general and historian who wrote The Peloponnesian War. He grew up after the Persian wars — in fifth century BCE Athens. This period was a very privileged age of Athenian power and enlightenment. Political power, democracy, and the golden age of science and the arts made Athens the school of international, Mediterranean Hellas. Hellas / Greece then was not a united country. By mid-fifth century BCE, there were about 2,000 Greek independent states spread in mainland Greece and the Aegean Sea, Ionia (Asia Minor), the Black Sea (Euxinos Pontos (Euxine (Welcoming) Sea), Magna Graecia (South Italy and Sicily), southern France and Spain, and North Africa.
ABOVE: Hellas / Greece: Red depicts Phoenician and blue Greek poleis (city-states), c 550 BCE. Public Domain.
Thucydides was an affluent Athenian citizen who loved Athens and respected Sparta. The Peloponnesian War came unexpectedly and shocked Thucydides and most Greeks. Athens was too preoccupied with its phenomenal rise to power and influence throughout the Mediterranean dotted by Greek poleis (city-states). Nevertheless, the conflict between Athens and the military superpower of Sparta unsettled all prevailing notions of democracy and civilization among the Greeks. The Peloponnesian War confirmed the fear between the Ionian Athenians and the Dorian Spartans. In time, the fear of Sparta for the real reasons behind the dramatic expansion of Athens, exploded into war. This was a vicious killing campaign that engulfed the entire Greek world, 431- 404 BCE, twenty-seven years in the last three decades of the fifth century BCE. Both Athens and Sparta were at the height of their material prosperity and power. Together in the beginning of the fifth century they defeated the Persians and, perhaps, without exaggeration, they believed themselves to be the Greek superpowers that had a right to rule the rest of the Greek people. It’s also quite possible that Athens was thinking of uniting all the Greek poleis into a Hellenic state or federation. We don’t know what dreams, ambitions, and concerns preoccupied Sparta. Most of Peloponnesos was allied to its policies. So, why was Sparta afraid of Athens? In all likelihood, Athens ignored Sparta in its Panhellenic policies of strategic oversight of the Mediterranean and protection of Greece from Persian danger.
We don’t know why Sparta became the enemy of Athens. Athens did not threaten Sparta or Peloponnesos. But Sparta’s decision to destroy Athens shattered the dreams and fears of both Athens and Sparta. And that is what the Peloponnesian War is all about. This was political madness they could not have foreseen. Both Athenians and Spartans acted like barbarians. Thucydides recorded the story of that conflict, quite rightly, as “a work of permanent value (Peloponnesian War 1.22).
Yet Thucydides was so heartbroken from the brutality of the Greek civil war that he abandoned his story in 411 BCE, 7 years before the war came to an end in 404 BCE with the defeat of Athens. Thucydides was above all a careful and objective historian, recording the events by talking to the leaders of both sides. He was not for the victory of Athena over Sparta and neither supported the victory of Sparta over Athens. He simply found the war incomprehensive and unpatriotic and destructive. Both Sparta and Athens were responsible for the war, though Sparta’s irrational fear of rising Athenian power triggered the conflict. In no way does Thucydides leads the reader to the trap of hatred or endless war, that one power has to kill the other in order to remain the sole hegemon. What Thucydides says is to respect the other side and do everything to resolve the difficulties and avoid the evil of civil war. He had read Homer and Herodotos and the tragic poet Aeschylos about the Trojan and Persian wars, so he dreamed of a united Hellas to be able to defend itself from any additional Persian invasions, not to have the Greeks kill each other, much less to provoke their enemies to invade the country. Thucydides’ story is not a trap for more war but an opportunity and a strategy to shed the barbaric instinct of mayhem and endless conflicts. Sparta started the dangerous precedent in the Greek world of inviting foreigners to intervene in Greek politics, in this case bringing the Persians on her side. The Persians funded Sparta’s war against Athens.
Reading Thucydides’ History until 411, one has no doubt that Athens was doomed. While the Peloponnesians were on their way to invade Attica in 431, the Spartan King Archidamos heading the expedition sent his ambassador Melesippos to the Athenians to see if there might be something they could do at that last moment to avoid the confrontation. But the Athenians under the leadership of Pericles found it offensive that their enemies, Spartans-Peloponnesians, would dare send them peace proposals under the threat of war. Thus they escorted Melesippos to the Peloponnesian frontier without even the courtesy of listening to his message, at which point the Spartan envoy said to them: “This day will mark the beginning of evils for the Hellenes” (The Peloponnesian War 2.12).
411 BCE: The 20th year of the Peloponnesian War
The year 411 BCE, the 20th year of the Peloponnesian War, marked a tumultuous period for Athens that included a reign of terror by the government of Four Hundred. The democratic Athenian forces in Samos, however, refused to obey the oligarchy in Athens. In fact the Athenian soldiers in Samos recalled Alcibiades, the Athenian general who was guilty of treason by joining Sparta and Persia against Athens. Meanwhile, the oligarchs in Athens launched an outright state treasonous effort to bring Spartan troops into Athens, the Four Hundred tyrants becoming Five Thousand. But the grab of the oligarchs for power failed and Athens returned to democracy. With these dramatic events in 411, Thucydides brings his story to an end.
We don’t know why Thucydides did not finish his history. He died after 404 BCE when Athens surrendered to Sparta. Perhaps the chaos and disintegration in Athens in 411 – the collapse of order and the near civil war – broke his heart and spirit. His beloved Athens had become savage. And he probably knew that Xenophon, student of Socrates, general and historian, would take on where he left off. Thucydides says it was difficult for Athenians to relinquish their power and freedom. By 411 BCE, they had enjoyed nearly a century of democratic government and some fifty years of ruling over others (The Peloponnesian War 8.68). But with Spartans closing in on them, their impoverishment, the specter of ever-greater losses and almost certain victory of Sparta, triggered their short and violent collapse into tyranny. And despite Alcibiades’ promise of Persian support, provided Athens revised its democratic constitution to one welcoming authoritarianism, the Four Hundred tyrants forbade the return of exiles because they did not want Alcibiades back. But Alcibiades did come back precisely because of the upheaval unleashed by the oligarchy. The democratic Athenian forces in Samos were ready to restore democracy in Athens by force if necessary. But Alcibiades successfully convinced the angry soldiers that civil war would be catastrophic for both Athens and Samos with Sparta immediately grabbing Athenian possessions in the Hellespont and the Aegean and starving Athens into submission. In addition, the Four Hundred tyrants in Athens were preparing Athens to resist the Athenian army of Samos while, simultaneously, they were crafting the treacherous abandonment of their polis to Sparta so long as they could save their lives and stay in power. Yet the Athenian soldiers in Athens demolished a wall the tyrants were building in order to carry out their surrender of Athens to Sparta.
Defeat of Athens
In the violence of the near civil war in Athens, the Spartans took Euboea from Athens in 411 BCE, an even greater calamity for the survival of Athens than the disastrous defeat of Athens in Sicily in 413 BCE. Athens imported more goods from Euboea than the whole of Attica. And with the mutiny of the Athenian forces in Samos, and without any navy in Piraeus, Sparta could force Athens to give up. But the Spartans, cautious as ever, did not besiege Athens. They lost an opportunity to end the war then and there after their capture of Euboea. Which is why Thucydides concluded that the Athenians were lucky to have the Spartans as their enemies (The Peloponnesian War 8.96).
American hegemon and rising China
This Greek historical background explains the emerging conflict between China (following the footsteps of powerful Sparta) and America pretending being Athens). The American Congressional consensus admits this much: One wonders that American and Chinese strategists have digested Thucydides to understand the changes in human behavior that war brings out in the open. War always makes warriors barbarians. And, of course, we are talking about potential modern warriors / barbarians armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. American strategists say:
“China has become more dangerous than we’ve given it credit for. It has grown its industrial base at our expense without becoming a good actor, both domestically and in the international political system we were promised. And we cannot allow ourselves to be in a position in the future where we are in some kind of war or conflict with China, and yet we are looking to them to make all of the things we need to compete with them. And, as such, what you need to do is decouple. You need to understand them as an antagonistic power that we treat as a hostile enemy.”
World map showing the US, left, and China, right. Public Domain
But there’s an alternative to conflict and war. A reporter rightly suggested that a partnership between America and China is definitely better than war. It’s necessary we do that. He said:
“[T]hat we and China are going to have to get together and actually be the partners that create an architecture for this. Otherwise, we’re going to just keep racing each other in some kind of crazy A.I. version of nuclear and probably bankrupt ourselves in doing it.”
True. A good beginning for an adult-like relationship between America and China would be for the US to stop arming the Chinese island of Taiwan. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University explains why the US looks at China like an enemy. He blames the neoconservatives who control US foreign policy. “The intention of the United States to impose dominance in all parts of the world,” Sachs says, “is not a conspiracy theory, but a set goal of the neoconservatives, who have dominated American politics since the end of the Cold War…. The United States of America is increasingly becoming a secretive “security state”, driven by illusions of global hegemony over common sense and decency for the whole world. The American Declaration of Independence was issued with “due regard for the opinions of mankind.” Today, [2020s] American leaders seem to have no proper respect for the opinions of humanity.”
Like Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE, America and China in the third decade of the twenty-first century are not easy to understand. I have lived in America for several decades, so, probably, I understand the country more than I understand China.
There’s no doubt, America’s neoconservatives have convinced themselves America is an exceptional polity and civilization. World War II smashed Europe and weakened the Soviet Union that lost about 30 million civilians and soldiers to the invading Germans. Yes, the Russians defeated Hitler’s hordes, but it was America that captured the power vacuum in devastated Europe and the world. Imitating Athens after the defeat of the Persians with its Delian League, he US created NATO, thus tying the Europeans to its strategy of domination in Europe and the rest of the world. Not only that, but defeated Germany and Japan, both fierce fighters and architects of WWII, America turned into obedient servants and military dependencies. This enabled the US to hold the keys to the security and control of Western Europe and Asia. These assets made America confident of its global hegemony. In fact, once communist China emerged on the political horizon in the 1980s, America opened its vast markets to the countless Chinese workers to manufacture goods for Americans. The experiment worked so well that in less than half-a-century, China became the workshop of the world. This global reach of China, unlike the quiet militarism of Sparta, was different than that of America. It was the product of post WWII impoverishment and military primacy. It was connected to selling cheap goods to affluent countries.
Ecological civilization
My knowledge of China is minimal, based primarily on reading and travel. I have travelled to China three times from 2014 to 2019. I gave several talks at Chinese universities and had the opportunity to experience the comfort and speed of a bullet train near Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius in Shandong province. More than a few megalopoleis, I visited a few villages of China. Peasants produce most of food in China.
Peasant and industrialized agriculture facing each other — in China. Painting at China Agricultural University, Beijing, China. Photo: Evaggelos VallianatosThere’s little doubt that China has tried, quite successfully, to become United States number 2. Chinese drones are even modifying the weather for more rain. China has nuclear weapons, extensive industrialized agriculture and experiments with genetic engineering. I raised questions of morality and sustainability with my Chinese colleagues who admitted they received their advanced education in the United States. Yet the idea that stayed with me was the state-supported discourse on ecological civilization.
President of China Xi Jinping. From a conference on ecological civilization, Shandong Hotel, Jinan, Shandong province, East China. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.
The daring of even thinking about ecological civilization is extraordinary. Our times in the twenty-first century is anything but ecological. Economics / capitalism / corporations / neoconservatives, and billionaires rule the world, including America and China. These institutions and executives and presidents and prime ministers are mad with political power. They ignore Thucydides, history, science and ethics in order to amass wealth by mining land and seas, logging of the forests, grabbing land and making huge factories of homogenized and genetically engineered crops sprayed by carcinogenic and neurotoxic poisons. These rulers also rely on war, petroleum and high tech AI for the protection of their looted treasures and “national” defense. This is not fiction or exaggeration. Climate chaos is a stark proof of the almost criminal indifference of the rulers of the world about the future and fate of the world population and that of Mother Earth.
Fifth US National Climate Assessment, Nov. 14, 2023.
This is the reason that I was so astonished and pleased by the talk in China about ecological civilization. Of course, China knows it is causing huge ecological damage to the planet. It is number one in the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Yet the Chinese scholars I talked to insist that ecological civilization matters, and the faster America becomes part of this dialogue the better for all. I agree.
Ecological civilization in action: Chinese peasant selecting seeds. Courtesy Beijing Center for Ecological Civilization.
America, however, elected President Trump, a climate denier.
The moral, political and scientific question is this: Can the planet put up with four more years of additional vast pollution? In either case, global temperature and disease will increase. The global temperature in 2025 is close to going over 1.5 degrees Celsius. And the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions is 175 million tons per day, the equivalent in heat to the explosion of 750,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs per day.
But this does not prevent environmental organizations, universities, and other philanthropic and biophilia institutions, and all of us, to cooperate among ourselves and with Chinese scientists and institutions to protect the Earth and its people from pollution. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladesh banker-revolutionary is right we need to create a new civilization free of fossil fuels. We are all at risk and we must protect ourselves.
Indeed, at times of danger like now, we should express our common humanity and help each other and plan to act together, as passionate as ever. Paco Carda, a Spanish journalist, expressed this feeling of mutual aid and support during the Great Blackout in Spain, April 28, 2025, when all of Spain turned black. He said: “But accepting we are vulnerable, each of us, should mean we rely on one another more, not less, that individualism and isolationism are not the path forward. In fact, what I saw this week is how much we are strengthened as a society and as individuals when we choose joy and mutual support rather than fear in the face of adversity.”
Ecological civilization without fossil fuels is a way out of adversity. It has the opportunity, like the ancient Chinese and Greek civilizations that gave it birth, to bring America and China together, understand the immense global danger of trashing the Earth as a way of life, and inspire the courage to reverse this galloping catastrophe. Americans and Chinese should keep reminding their leaders that ecological civilization matters. It is the idea, the philosophy and politics for our survival.
China is also a global leader in technology. “In a dozen years,” according to American reporters, “China has gone from a “copycat nation” to a juggernaut with world-class products that have at times leapfrogged those in the West. Xiaomi — once best known as a maker of iPhone knockoffs — delivered 135,000 electric cars last year, while Apple gave up on its effort to produce an E.V. after burning $10 billion over a decade…. Along the way, the country also cultivated an abundance of STEM talent, robust supply chains, incredible manufacturing heft and a domestic ecosystem so brutally competitive that the only way to survive is to never stop iterating. This China-dominated future is already arriving — unless we get our act together.”
But instead of brutal AI and robot competition, I would cooperate with China and channel American and Chinese talent to solve the world’s nightmares: abolishing nuclear weapons, fight climate chaos by doing away with fossil fuels and stop planetary ecocide. Such cooperation would end up with ecological civilization.
Thucydides did not speak of ecological civilization because ecological civilization was already in place. Pythagoras speaking and teaching in sixth century BCE Magna Graecia said no Greek should ever sacrifice an animal to the gods. Life was sacred. In the fourth century of our era, a thousand years after Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher named Iamblichos, praised Pythagoras for his godlike behavior, in fact, for being god Apollo and living the life of a man among the Greeks for their benefit and the welfare of humankind. Pythagoras’ teaching among the Greeks blended mathematics and the sciences of the Cosmos with lawgiving, control of speech, good government, and piety for the gods, and mercy towards all living things. Iamblichos’ model of divine Pythagoras was a matchless Hellenic religious and philosophical leader who offered the Greeks and educated Romans guidance for leading a good life.
Two hundred years after Pythagoras, in the fourth century BCE, Plato taught the Earth was the oldest of the gods, the goddess that made possible day and night. Plato’s student Aristotle invented the science of zoology. Aristotle said animals are beautiful and nature is perfect.
Thucydides before Plato and Aristotle spoke passionately for peace, which is absolutely essential for ecological civilization, a way for people to live in accord with the demands and rewards of the natural world.
Cowboy economics, me first, and billionaire’s military vision of AI get us nowhere but in conflict. America and China must have the courage to deal with each other in humility and not the dreadful and exterminating power of nuclear bombs. Together, they can shape the future by cooperation and mutual respect. The idea is to stop fouling our only nest in this only life-supporting planet, our Mother Earth. The aim is no less than saving ourselves by protecting this beautiful planet.
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Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and ecopolitical theorist. He studied zoology and Greek history at the University of Illinois, earned a Ph.D. in Greek and European history at the University of Wisconsin, did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard, worked on Capitol Hill and the US EPA, and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including:
Freedom: Clear Thinking and Inspiration from 5,000 Years of Greek History (Universal Publishers, 2025).
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