Thucydides’s Trap: Is the Marine Corps Prepared?

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Thucydides’s Trap: Is the Marine Corps Prepared?
By Corporal Zachary T. Blackburn, U.S. Marine Corps | April 6, 2021
 
 
Corporal Zachary T. Blackburn, U.S. Marine Corps

 

“Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world.”1 Napoleon Bonaparte’s warning to the world, largely ignored when he spoke them to the world 203 years ago, has finally come to fruition. The day has come; China, a nation of 1.4 billion citizens, has awoken and shaken the world militarily, economically, and culturally. China’s current rise has it hurling towards an inevitable superpower versus superpower war with the United States where the readiness of the Marine Corps might be the deciding factor.

Ancient Greek historian Thucydides once said, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”2 Thucydides was referring to the Peloponnesian War, fought between the regionally dominant power of Sparta and the rising power of Athens. The rise of Athens challenged the dominance held by Sparta in the entirety of ancient Greece, just as China’s hasty rise into the world stage as a global power has challenged America’s place as the global hegemon. Thucydides’s Trap, as it is now known, is the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. Despite the fact that battle would bring zero benefits to either nation, Thucydides watched woefully as Sparta and his home city-state of Athens fell into war two millennia ago. Although Sparta ultimately won the war, the negative repercussions affected the whole of Greece. It is worth noting that in majority of cases of nations falling into the inevitable war of Thucydides’s Trap, the provocative nation that began the conflict was not the ruling and rising power, but an ally of one of them. Since 1500, a hegemon has been displaced by a rising power 16 times; 12 of those times have resulted in a major power war, making war the rule and not the exception to Thucydides’s Trap.

https://blog.usni.org/posts/2021/04/06/thucydidess-trap-is-the-marine-corps-prepared