What Can Thucydides Teach Us About China’s Rise to Power?

“The problem with America as a maritime power in Asia is that, like the United Kingdom of yesteryear, the United States is not an Asian power.”

There are two types of civilizations: Continental and Marine. From Thucydides to the present showdown in East Asia, history has been a contest between these two types of civilizations. The guidance of Thucydides and geopolitics should offer us a map to the outcomes of the great game in East Asia between China and the United States.

Thucydides and Geopolitical Reality

One of the significant undercurrents to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is the geopolitical dynamics in the rivalry between Athens and Sparta and the war strategies used by both sides. Athens was the great maritime empire and marine polis. Sparta was the dialectical contrast as the great land power and continental polis.

The movement to war was between proxy continental and maritime civilizations in Corcyra and Corinth. Though Corcyra was a colony of Corinth, Corcyra had grown into a prosperous maritime city with the second largest navy in Greece. This reality was something that the Corcyraean representatives sold to Athens in their bid for independence. The Corcyraeans even tell the Athenians that they are “favourably situated for a coasting voyage either to Italy or Sicily.”

While Corinth was a major naval power, its foremost position was that of a land-based city-state. It was important for Sparta, then, to pull Corinth into its orbit by ensuring Corinth be an enemy of Athens. Through the Corcyraean struggle for independence we see the land-sea dynamic at play in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta aligned with the more immediate land power and Athens with the more immediate sea power because Sparta was the great land power and Athens the great sea power of fifth-century BC Greece.