Thucydides Tuzağı: Yükselen Güç ile Yerleşik Güç Arasındaki Yapısal Gerilim

Reading Thucydides in the wolf world

The term Thucydides’s Trap has caught on since Professor Graham Allison wrote his 2017 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? The core concept comes from Greek soldier-historian Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War who identifies the structural stress that occurs when a major rising power is perceived to threaten to displace an established power. My intention here is not to explain Allison’s work or his treatment of the trap but to point to how modern-day scholars and policymakers cherrypick episodes from Thucydides’s work to justify their own approaches. I believe, as the post-World War II international security architecture unravels and we enter what some describe as the wolf world, that it is important to analyse Thucydides’s history in view of the book’s hermeneutics rather than picking up episodes that suit one’s own predilections. Thucydides arrived in the United States policy corridors with Dr Henry Kissinger. He had taught the text at Harvard and was keenly familiar with it. But upon joining Richard Nixon’s administration in the White House, he sought fit to focus on the Melian Dialogue, colouring outside the lines. The one line, “The strong exact what they can; the weak concede what they must,” became the slogan of Cold War strategies. Kissinger knew that Thucydides message was far more nuanced and he was not justifying imperial overreach. But that was for the classroom. The world Kissinger had to tackle was one in which ‘man was wolf to man,’ homo homini lupus of Plautus popularised by Thomas Hobbes. That misrepresentation has generally informed US policymakers since then. Now that cruder minds are ruling America and the precepts of International Law, for whatever they were worth, have been defenestrated and America’s foreign policy has become a Kabuki theatre, a few words about Thucydides’s work are in order. The structural architecture of History of the Peloponnesian War relies on a psychological arc that connects the Plague of Athens, the Melian Dialogue (nearly 14 years later) and the Sicilian Expedition (a year later). Far from putting down a simple chronicle of military manoeuvres, Thucydides tracks the internal rot of the Athenian psyche through the description of the Plague. By tracing this trajectory, the reader discovers that the moral dissolution initiated by the plague directly fostered the intellectual hubris that were to lead to Melos, which inevitably culminated in the material ruin of the Sicilian campaign. The foundational fracture occurs in Book Two with the Plague (430 BCE). Thucydides describes a city where the sudden, indiscriminate terror of death obliterates law (nomos) and religious restraint. Faced with immediate mortality, citizens abandon honour for instant gratification, arguing that the virtuous and the wicked die alike. This lawlessness (anomia) institutionalises a new societal ethos: the abandonment of traditional justice in favour of self-interest and survival. The plague does not merely kill bodies; it extinguishes the moral constraints of the polis. Might and appetite replace civic virtue. The plague, Thucydides tells us, also claimed Pericles and his family. That death, within the hermeneutics of the text, becomes a metaphor for the demise of nomos. The emergence of more populist and aggressive figures, such as Cleon, who prioritised personal popularity and raw emotion over steady strategy, comes to symbolise anomia. This internalised lawlessness manifests later as aggressive foreign policy in the Melian Dialogue (416 BCE) of Book Five. But the seeds of Melos were sown earlier. Two years after Pericles’ death, Athens had the Mytilenian debate between Cleon and Diodotus. Cleon fiercely argued in favour of executing the entire population of Mytilene to send a message of terror. While Diodotus narrowly persuaded the assembly to reverse the decision to execute all citizens, the Athenians still exacted a brutal and bloody punishment on the city. At Melos, the Athenian envoys articulate a chilling political realism, famously declaring that, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This worldview seems to be the direct philosophical descendant of the plague’s nihilism. Having lost their respect for divine law and cosmic justice during the pestilence, the Athenians now claim that the rule of the stronger is a universal law of nature. The moral decay hardened into intellectual hubris. Athens no longer seeks to justify its empire through justice or leadership, but purely through raw, unyielding power. The immediate narrative pivot to the Sicilian Expedition (415–413 BCE) in Book Six reveals this hubris in action, dramatised through the opposing speeches of Nicias and Alcibiades. Nicias represents the ghost of old Athenian moderation. He desperately warns the assembly against overreach, cautioning that they are leaving enemies behind to chase a massive, unknown island. But the plague-damaged psyche of Athens, now driven entirely by imperial appetite and the illusion of invincibility, cannot tolerate restraint. Instead, they rally behind Alcibiades (notice the shift from the Cleon-Diodotus debate). Alcibiades is brilliant, reckless, and entirely devoid of civic responsibility. He appeals to the city’s insatiable desire for expansion, arguing that an empire must grow or it will wither. Ultimately, Thucydides’s narrative acts as a tragic warning. The lawlessness born in the plague pits became the strategic blindness that was to mock the Melians and finally drove Athens to sail into the Sicilian trap. In Sicily, the inversion is completed. The Athenians are utterly destroyed, reduced to the same desperate reliance on “hope” and suffering that they had ridiculed at Melos. Through this connection Thucydides demonstrates that the real danger of power overreach is not always external opposition but the internal erosion of the moral and intellectual clarity required to understand the limits of power. There are no perfect analogies but history’s verdicts are often uncannily similar. The writer has an abiding interest in foreign and security policies and life’s ironies. X: @ejazhaider Header image: An AI-generated bust of Henry Kissinger in the likeness of Thucydides.