Don’t Let British Intelligence Spring The Thucydides Trap On The United States!

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President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China have just met for the first time in nearly seven years. Their last meeting was on June 29th of 2019 at the G-20 summit. What is to be hoped for, at best, is what President Xi called “building a constructive China-U.S.relationship of strategic stability.” That may well include China playing a crucial mediating role in the Iran-Israel/U.S. conflict.

The Anglo-American unprovoked war with Iran has turned into a foolish, unprovoked strategic defeat. It is reminiscent of what happened to Athens in the disastrous Sicily expedition of 415-413 B.C. Neocon Robert Kagan, husband of Ukrainian Cookie Monster Victoria Nuland put it in the way a geopolitical sophist and imperialist of his breed would be expected to in an article published in The Atlantic:

”It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored….The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

In a statement welcoming President Trump, President Xi used this formulation: “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world? Can we build a bright future together for our bilateral relations in the interest of the well-being of the two peoples and the future of humanity? These are the questions vital to history, to the world and to the people," said Xi.

What, however, is the so-called “Thucydides Trap?” A political scientist by the name of Graham Allison has popularized one idea about this—that a rising power confronts a hegemonic, but declining power, which is faced with having its hegemony supplanted. This has been used for the past decade to characterize the relationship between China and the United States. But is that what Thucydides actually wrote, or thought?

Historian Cliff Kiracofe contends otherwise. Kiracofe thinks that, in part, it is Robert Kagan’s father, Donald Kagan, an “authority” on the Peloponnesian War (431-404BC) who is responsible for this erroneous belief. Kiracofe contends that Thucydides did not think that there was an inevitable animal-like conflict that needed to erupt between two or more nations, each possessing great power. Rather, through diplomacy, it was contended that a “harmony of interests” could be reached and enjoyed. It was, however, the followers of Leo Strauss, including what Kiracofe calls “the West Coast Straussians” including from Stanford University and the Claremont Institute who have perpetrated this neo-Darwinist view of an inevitable “clash of empires” between China and the United States.

The Straussians, heavily influenced by the British imperial outlook of Lord Palmerston, intentionally omit the history of American diplomacy in the Pacific, and the figures Cassius Marcellus Clay, Wharton Barker, Erasmus Peshine Smith, Anson Burlingame and many others—including President Abraham Lincoln’s orientation to the Pacific, in the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad. The American military tradition of Homer Lea, Arthur MacArthur, and his son Douglas MacArthur and other Americans is omitted as well. Tonight’s discussion will visit this tradition and counter the notion that there is an inevitable “Thucydides Trap”—a trap which exists only in the “British Empire of the Mind” that the Trump Administration and the United States must be extricated from.