Emphasis mine:
«the Peloponnesian War, which pitted Athens against Sparta. **Ultimately, Athens was vanquished.**
“What made war inevitable,” Thucydides famously wrote, “was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Many contemporary scholars have latched onto this line as a succinct explanation for the inevitability of great power war. Like Athens and Sparta, we are told, the United States and China risk falling into a “Thucydides trap.”
But, as the historian himself makes clear, the war’s causes ran deeper. What made Athens’s surging power so worrisome was its violation of Hellenic norms, in seeking to transform its consensual leadership into a coercive empire. During the Spartans’ debate over whether to go to war, a visiting Athenian delegation justified their own country’s imperial turn: “It was not we who set the example, for it has always been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.” The gambit backfired, confirming suspicions of Athens’s imperialist intentions and leading the Spartans and their allies to approve a declaration of war.
What made war inevitable, in other words, was not merely the presence of rival great powers, but the fact that one of those powers was abusing the rules of the system that had enabled its rise to greatness in the first place.…
All these advantages are now being abandoned. The Trump administration is destroying any remaining faith that the United States can be trusted to exercise power responsibly. It is also erasing any distinction between the exercise of American might and Russian conduct in Ukraine and Chinese behavior in the South China Sea or (potentially) over Taiwan.
Leaders, at the end of the day, require followers. Mr. Trump may insist, as he has in the Iran conflict, that “WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!” But if the United States stays on this course, it will find itself bereft of allies and friends, a lonely superpower in a lawless international system it has helped to create. It is not too late to reverse course — and that starts with a closer reading of Thucydides.»
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