During Donald Trump’s recent visit to Beijing, President Xi Jinping used a scholarly quote to frame the relationship between the world’s two greatest global powers. He invoked the Greek historian Thucydides, author of the “History of the Peloponnesian War” (5th century BC), who observed that the rise of Athens created such fear in Sparta, the dominant power, that it chose war, which culminated in the surrender of Athens in 404 BC.
The “Thucydides Trap” questions whether the emergence of a new power inevitably leads to armed conflict or if it can be managed peacefully. With this allusion, Xi seemed to show a willingness to negotiate stability between the two powers.
American political scientist Graham Allison (of Harvard’s Belfer Center) coined the term in his book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” (2017). Allison analyzed 16 cases from the last 500 years and found that 75% of them ended in war. The remaining four cases, Allison observes, were resolved peacefully through:
* Diplomacy (Treaty of Tordesillas), in the rivalry between Portugal and Spain in the 16th century.
* Nuclear deterrence, during the Cold War between the US and the USSR.
* Sensible acceptance (the “Great Rapprochement”) of the new reality, during the handover of imperialism from Britain to the United States at the end of the 19th century.
* Cooperation between like-minded countries (EU and the Euro), when German reunification (1989-1990) altered the balance of power in Europe.
This framework invites us to speculate whether the Thucydides Trap also explains other social and economic phenomena currently occurring in Bolivia.
The conflict between a democracy that values the individual and social organizations that control the masses contains the trap of resorting to violent solutions from both sides, whenever the government disregards the sphere of these corporations or the latter attempt to impose conditions of governability that are not their purview, as we see these days. This conflict can only be overcome, without resorting to violence, through dialogue that respects the proper functions of each party on matters of common interest.
Likewise, we fall into the Thucydides Trap due to misgivings regarding the energy transition, understood as the gradual and planned replacement of fossil sources with renewable sources, essentially in electricity generation and transportation.
Hydrocarbons have dominated the global matrix for a century due to their efficiency and abundance, but they are finite, contribute to global warming, and generate geopolitical dependence, as we are painfully experiencing these days. Renewable energies, on the other hand, are inexhaustible, universally distributed, and have a lower impact on the climate.
The “trap” appears when the hydrocarbon sector (companies and analysts) perceives a threat of being displaced. Consequently, they attack renewables for their intermittency (which is solvable with technology) and costs (which have fallen sharply).
In Bolivia, the conflict between the dominant power of gas and the emerging power of renewables is fueled by the illusion of maintaining gas hegemony, without considering that this energy cycle has been exhausted.
On the contrary, the emergence of clean sources—which in Bolivia are a necessity rather than an option—should have the cooperation of the fossil sector (for example, by cutting the subsidy for gas used in thermoelectric plants) to promote a gradual and orderly transition toward a healthier balance in the energy matrix. It is hoped that the new electricity law will allow for the overcoming of any misgivings toward the energy transition.