Latest news with #Thucydides
The Guardian
17-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Is the veracity of memoirs that important?
People are upset when a memoir isn't 100% true (The Guardian view on The Salt Path scandal: memoirists have a duty to tell the truth, 11 July)? Really? Get over it … it's a book. Written by a person. How many people do you know who always tell the truth? Plus, how many people do you know who tell a good story that has no embellishments in order to make it a slightly better story? Even aside from enhancing a story, most people's memories are inherently inaccurate. Two people at the same event will not report the exact same scenario. A memoir is an opinion of a history that has been embellished to make it a good story. A memoir is not a dry historical account of events. Just like a conversation in real life, readers need to distinguish the facts that they choose to believe from those that are embellished. I have no problem with this. A perfect historical account of most people's lives would be very boring indeed. Rachel A LawrenceSan Francisco, California, US The best justification for the veracity or otherwise of memoirs comes in the prologue to Spike Milligan's memoir 'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?', in which he used a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides on the reliability of memoirs: 'I have described nothing but what I saw myself.' Then added: 'I just jazzed mine up a little.'Andrew Keeley Warrington, Cheshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
AllAfrica
16-07-2025
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Thucydides trap averted: China speed, dodgy data and the Houthis
You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one John Lennon Humanity may have lucked out. China speed, dodgy data and the Houthis may just have derailed the 21st Century Thucydides trap. Meme: imgflip While Athens and Sparta careened unstoppably towards the Peloponnesian war, each powerless to arrest rising tensions, today's Sparta should consider itself lucky: It cannot win the 21st Century Peloponnesian War and, as such, will not press for one. The most consequential military development of the past few years – and there have been legion – is empirical proof that expeditionary navies are obsolete. China proved it in the South China Sea. Ukraine proved it in the Black Sea. And the Houthis (the Houthis!) proved it in the Red Sea. Like the Blitzkrieg field-tested during the Spanish Civil War and Azerbaijan's drone warfare against Armenia, recent littoral challenges against expeditionary navies will prove more consequential in a completely different theater. But in a good way – more to preclude future conflict than as a field test for future tactics. Contrary to popular belief, China does not covet the South China Sea for mere scraps like oil, natural gas or fish. China is more than happy to negotiate with other claimants to exploit South China Sea resources. What China wants in the South China Sea are airstrips, missile sites, naval bases and electronic listening posts, extending the southern maritime security perimeter. What China really wants in the South China Sea is a theater, far away from anything of real value (Taiwan, for example), to demonstrate US Naval impotence for all of Asia to witness. China's Nine-Dash Line. Source: Facebook China does not make a move unless strategic advantage has been established and escalation dominance is assured. China started large-scale island building in the South China Sea's Spratly Islands in late 2013. This was a declaration of two things: that China was going to take its 9- (now 10-) dashed line claims seriously, and that the PLA Rocket Force's anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs) had been thoroughly tested and were deployed and operational. Without a missile shield providing escalation dominance, the US Navy could have stopped island construction with the mere presence of a carrier strike group (CSG). In 1996, before China could threaten American aircraft carriers, President Clinton sent two US Navy CSG into the Taiwan Strait as the PLA was conducting missile tests to sway Taiwan's presidential election. Out-flexed by the US Navy CSGs, China's intimidation tactics failed with President Lee Teng-hui, the despised 'separatist,' handily winning reelection. China developed ASBMs to prevent the US Navy from besting the PLA in future showdowns. Given the PLA Rocket Force's missile umbrella over the South China Sea in the 2010's, China was able to construct and militarize seven artificial islands unchallenged. On April 22, 2022, Ukrainian fighters launched two R-360 Neptune cruise missiles at the Moskva cruiser, Russia's Black Sea fleet flagship. It was the largest Russian ship to sink since WWII. The Moskva carried S-300F missiles which provided long-range air defense for the Black Sea fleet then bombarding Ukrainian positions. Ukrainian fighters have subsequently sunk or damaged additional Russian ships and a submarine with a combination of missiles and naval drones. Russia has since relocated its Black Sea fleet east, from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk, largely taking it out of the fight. In 2024, with the PLA Navy having grown from 255 to 400 ships over the past decade while the US Navy shrank from over 300 to 299 ships, China began aggressively enforcing its claim on an atoll occupied by a purposely shipwrecked Filipino vessel. China Coast Guard (CCG) ships harassed Filipino boats supplying the handful of marines stationed on the crumbling wreck. The world saw dramatic footage of large China Coast Guard cutters water hosing and ramming small Filipino supply boats. In one incident, Chinese Coast Guard personnel boarded a Philippine supply boat and engaged in melee combat using handheld weapons. A Filipino soldier lost a thumb. The US Navy's response was to redeploy the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and its escorts from East Asia to the Middle East. This left the Western pacific without a CSG at the height of South China Sea tensions involving a US treaty ally. Thus it was revealed that 1) the US Navy was spread very thin and 2) the US Navy was not going to be maneuvered into a showdown with China's brand-new navy and rocket force by the Philippines. In May of this year, President Trump reached an unsatisfying ceasefire agreement with the Houthis after intensive bombing operations proved ineffective and were marred by mishaps. US Navy operations against the Houthis have resulted in the loss of three F/A-18 fighters (one to 'friendly fire' and two to 'accidents'), more than a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones and more than $1 billion worth of ammunition. The ceasefire fell well short of President Trump's promise to 'completely annihilate' the Houthis. The Yemeni fighters have only agreed to refrain from attacking US Navy ships. They have continued their operations against Israeli-connected shipping. The ceasefire neutered the US Navy in the Red Sea. They could be there. Or they could not be there. It doesn't make a shred of difference. That the Houthis fought the US Navy to a draw can only be seen as a humiliating defeat by Asia. Compare Japan (and South Korea/Taiwan/Australia) to the Instagram model who just watched her bodybuilder boyfriend get beat up by a skinny migrant worker. According to press leaks, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby pressed Japan and Australia to clarify their intentions in a Taiwan contingency. Leaking Colby's demand shuts down Washington's pressure tactics by airing them to domestic political opprobrium in those countries. The leak was unsurprising given the US Navy's less-than-stellar performances in the Red Sea and the South China Sea, demonstrating Japan's and Australia's lack of confidence in US resolve and capabilities. Why would anyone commit to defend Taiwan if the US itself refuses to do so? Why would Japan and Australia commit to helping a navy that hung the Philippines out to dry only to get humiliated by the Houthis? China's anti-ship missiles and drones are likely to be more effective than those used by the Houthis. What we are witnessing is the US attempting to do hegemony on the cheap. Alliances in this situation are structurally brittle. Alliance partners want to free ride while a fading hegemon tries to buck-pass. When the hegemon has not demonstrated the resolve and cannot demonstrate the capability to shoulder all the costs, there is not much incentive for the hangers-on to help lighten the load. And without commitments from alliance partners to enter the fray, US resolve to go it alone is diminished as well. The Thucydides trap theorizes that war is likely when a rising power challenges a dominant established power. The fear inspired by a rising power causes the dominant power to attempt to suppress the challenger, resulting in ever-increasing tensions and an inevitable path to war. With this backdrop, many Western media reports on China begin with the stock phrase, 'China, the world's second largest economy .…' While this bit of data-delusion has hamstrung efforts to contain China, it could very well prove to have been a great boon for humanity, short-circuiting the Thucydides trap with its every utterance. Vaclav Havel said China's economic rise was so fast that 'we had not yet had time to be astonished.' Calling China the world's second largest economy is a media tick that the West has yet to abandon. Any proper accounting of China's productive and consumptive powers results in an economy twice the size of the US (see here). Taking liberties with the UN System of National Accounts, China has flown under the radar, delaying the moment of proper Western astonishment. China is no longer the rising power but the established power. All efforts to contain China from tech sanctions to trade wars to media slander have been ineffectual if not counterproductive. China's manufacturing sector is twice that of the US in exchange rate terms and three times that of the US in purchasing power parity terms. On most indices (i.e. top journals, citations, patents), China's scientific and technological output is well above if not multiples of the US and increasing exponentially. China's human capital pipeline is a juggernaut, producing 6-8 times the STEM graduates as the US. Ancient Greece was not dealing with an Athens suddenly twice Sparta's size. The Peloponnesian War could very well have been averted if Athens rose so quickly that Sparta 'had not yet had time to be astonished' and we would never have heard of Thucydides because his 'History of the Peloponnesian Peace' would have been a tedious snoozefest. Over the past few weeks, modern Sparta appears to be coming apart at the seams. Japan angrily denounced American efforts to dictate its defense budget. South Korea elected a China-leaning president. Spain's intelligence agency awarded its communications contract to Huawei. The French Parliament produced a report pushing the EU to realign with China. Brazil will explore building a transcontinental railroad with China. When nations realize that expeditionary navies are obsolete and their breath catches up to China's astonishing growth, the speed of the realignment will be just as astonishing. It will resemble nothing short of a rout. This should benefit everyone involved, from put upon Europeans to the bonsai-ed Japan and South Korea (see here) to LGBTQIAS2S+-ed Taiwan (see here) to Legalist Qin-esque PRC able to finally relax into its Confucian Tang-esque form. Most of all, it will benefit the United States of America, which can finally come home, circle wagons, lick wounds, plant trees and recover from eight decades of shouldering the costs of hegemony.
The Hill
11-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
What Shakespeare and Ancient Greece teach us about ending the Ukraine War
'War,' as Thucydides once wrote, 'is a violent teacher.' But it teaches in strange and terrible ways. It exposes illusions, punishes pride and delivers suffering without justice. This the Greeks knew. This Shakespeare dramatized. And this we are once again in danger of forgetting. Is a NATO-Russia war over Ukraine likely? Not today. But is it still possible? More than most Western leaders are willing to admit. And if war comes, it will not arrive with fanfare or strategy. It will not be declared. It will unfold, like all great tragedies, slowly, then all at once. It will emerge from misjudgment, drift and the kind of political theatre that disguises itself as prudence. We must start with what the tragedians knew. Aeschylus taught that the hubris of kings leads to the fall of cities. Euripides warned that democracies, when swayed by passion and panic, can become just as reckless as tyrants. Thucydides chronicled the disintegration of norms and restraint in a time of protracted war. Shakespeare showed us the fatal convergence of pride, misperception and political paralysis. In 'Coriolanus,' the warrior cannot adjust to the world of speech and compromise. In 'King Lear,' misread love and rash judgment tear a kingdom apart. In 'Macbeth,' ambition overtakes judgment and fate completes the ruin. All these patterns now haunt our world. Vladimir Putin does not want open war with NATO. Despite rhetorical bluster, his aims remain limited — territorial consolidation in eastern Ukraine, political domination in Kyiv and the erosion of Western will. His military, despite recent advances, is depleted and its elite formations are gone. Russian casualties are staggering at more than a million and counting. Equipment is being replaced with imports from North Korea, Iran and China. Putin is not preparing to fight NATO — he is struggling to sustain pressure on Ukraine. NATO is doing what Western coalitions always do — too much to stay neutral, too little to be decisive. We arm Ukraine, train its soldiers, share intelligence, approve long-range strikes and now flirt openly with deploying military trainers. France has said the quiet part aloud. The F-16s are arriving. The British support Ukrainian strikes inside Russia and American satellites guide them. The U.S., after a long and bruising domestic delay, has resumed aid. But there is no strategy — only momentum. This is not escalation by choice but by gravity. Like Macbeth, NATO is 'stepp'd in so far' that going back seems harder than going on. We committed to defend Ukraine's sovereignty, then to ensure its survival. Now, by increments, we have assumed a role not quite of belligerent, but no longer of mere benefactor. And yet, we tell ourselves, the line holds. But history — especially tragic history — warns otherwise. In 2022, a Ukrainian air defense missile landed in Poland, killing two civilians. In 2024, Russian drones crossed into Romanian airspace. In March 2025, a missile strike near Lviv killed a Polish aid worker. All of these were treated as incidents — explained, managed, defused. But what they were, in truth, was rehearsal. One day, something will go wrong. A NATO logistics node is struck, a drone crosses a border or a Russian jet is downed near a surveillance platform. And then we are no longer theorizing. Article Five of the NATO Treaty will be triggered or invoked in language that demands a response. And then the tragic gears will be fully engaged. What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is not just the fog of war — it is the fog of politics. President Trump views NATO as a bad deal. He has mused that the U.S. might not defend allies who fall short of its defense spending targets. He has even said, in so many words, that he might let Russia do what it will. Deterrence depends on credibility, and right now, American credibility is cracked. This does not mean war will happen. But it does mean Putin may begin to believe he has space to test. He will not do it with tanks, but with subtler tools — cyber operations, deniable drone strikes, and sabotage campaigns, all calibrated to slip just below NATO's threshold of response. If the alliance flinches, the structure begins to come apart. And if it overreacts, we are in the grip of escalation. Here is where Thucydides speaks most clearly. In his account of the Peloponnesian War, what doomed Athens was not just power — it was misperception, fear and the belief that retreat was more dangerous than advance. The tragic irony, of course, is that the war they sought to avoid through deterrence was made inevitable by their own actions. 'The strong do what they can,' as he put it. 'The weak suffer what they must.' But in war, even the strong can suffer from their own illusions. We are not Athens, but nor are we immune to the illusions that doomed it. There are still pathways out. The first is what we have now: a grinding, bounded conflict. Ukraine bleeds; Russia advances in inches; NATO arms and advises, coming ever closer to the line. But the line holds. This is the path of inertia — not peace, not war, but something cold and hot all at once. The second is diplomatic resolution. This would mean a partition of Ukraine and would require the West to abandon its rhetoric of total Ukrainian victory and begin speaking of equilibrium and realism. It would mean admitting that not all wrongs can be righted. The ancients called this 'sophrosyne' — wisdom born of restraint. But such restraint is in short supply. The third is fracture. NATO, under Trump, may become an alliance in name only. NATO may persist, but its collective will may wither. That invites testing — and testing invites failure. And the fourth is escalation — a tragedy, a war no one wants, but perhaps no one stops, not because it was planned, but because it became inevitable only after the final misjudgment. As Hamlet says, 'If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now … the readiness is all.' But readiness is not foresight. And even Hamlet could not prevent what followed. This is the true lesson of tragedy — not fatalism, but warning. Tragedy teaches that greatness without wisdom becomes destruction, that power without restraint becomes ruin. That delay, disguise and moral theatre are not substitutes for strategy. NATO and Russia may not be fated for war. But they are now in the tragic position of actors in a play whose ending remains unwritten, but whose arc is becoming familiar. So we must resist the fantasy of control. We must think tragically — not as an excuse for paralysis, but as a summons to vigilance. Shakespeare, Thucydides and the Greek tragedians left us a mirror. In it, we see our ambition and fear — and the cost of not knowing ourselves until the final act. A NATO-Russia war is still avoidable. But the moment of choice is not infinite. And the stage is being set. Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.
Sky News AU
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
‘Thucydides trap': Donald Trump has ‘obliterated' the legacy media
Co-host of Steve Bannon's War Room Natalie Winters says US President Donald Trump has 'obliterated the legitimacy' of the legacy media. 'I think obviously Trump is great for the ratings, right, of these networks,' Ms Winters told Sky News host Rowan Dean. 'If you look at the settlement, sort of through the longer frame of a trajectory, how President Trump has just totally obliterated the legitimacy, the credibility … of some of these legacy media institutions. "I always sort of described it as a Thucydides trap.'
National Post
24-06-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Anthony Koch: Sometimes, war is the answer
Article content The American Civil War was not the result of insufficient compromise. It was the inevitable clash between two incompatible moral orders. No committee could reconcile slavery with freedom. The matter had to be settled by force. Article content And the 20th century speaks even louder. The Second World War resulted from the failure to confront aggression when it was in its infancy. Peace in our time gave us war in our streets. Hitler was not appeased, he was emboldened. And when the reckoning finally came, it did not arrive through dialogue. It arrived through tanks, fleets and firebombs. It arrived because it had to. Article content Diplomacy, in truth, does not substitute for war. It follows it. Negotiation is not what ends conflict. Victory is. The treaties of Westphalia, Versailles and Camp David did not avert war, they formalized its outcome. Even today, peace agreements only work when enforced by the fear of what happens if they collapse. As Machiavelli warned, 'War cannot be avoided; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.' Article content Article content We may prefer the language of compromise, but the world often speaks another tongue. As Thucydides wrote, 'The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.' That is not an endorsement, it's a warning. Those who forget it do not abolish war, they only ensure that when it comes, it comes on someone else's terms. Article content Even now, the pattern repeats. The rise of revanchist powers — Russia, Iran, China — was not provoked by the West being too forceful. It was enabled by the West being too timid. Russia did not invade Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine because NATO expanded. It did so because the West shrank. Article content Iran did not radicalize because it was cornered, but because we left its ambitions unchecked. And China threatens Taiwan not because it's afraid of war, but because it no longer believes the West is willing to fight one. Article content Israel's recent campaigns against Iran and Hezbollah offers a current, unmistakable example. For years, western commentators wrung their hands about the risks of escalation. But a low-intensity, perpetual and asymmetric war was already being fought. Iran had been waging it with drones, rockets and proxies. Article content Article content It was only when Israel struck back with precision and force, eliminating key Iranian military leaders and humiliating Hezbollah's command structure, that the region began to shift. Article content Suddenly, even hostile actors started co-operating, allowing Israel to use their airspace and shooting down Iranian missiles, to contain further escalation. Why? Because war, judiciously applied, imposed clarity where diplomacy had only bought delay. Article content War, in such cases, is not madness. It is realism. It is not cruelty. It is consequence. And those who think it's obsolete are not pacifists — they are amateurs. Article content The anti-war camp today is full of high-minded rhetoric and low-grade intellect. Its adherents conflate comfort with virtue, safety with wisdom. But the iron law of history is simple: peace must be secured, not assumed. And where irreconcilable visions of power and order collide, war is not a detour, it is the road itself. Article content Article content Article content
