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Thucydides Trap historical metaphors tend to fall into the trap of ignoring relevant actors, the issues of when national advantages get conflated with national strategies, and incompetent leaders.
The Thucydides Trap paradigm is a way of modeling behavior between two potential hegemons, but by the nature of the historical allusion (where ancient Sparta and Athens were by far the regional leading leaders of coalitions with limited agency) and general proposer propensities (the Thucydides Trap is most often raised in realist schools of theory, which are currently framed in bipolar conflicts), it's really, really bad at recognizing or accounting for other relevant actors. These actors not only have their own agency (France was a major military power in its own right, and there's a reason France-British rapproachment coincided with the rise of torpedo speed boats that the Royal Navy couldn't have stopped from throttling channel trade), but their presence and potential drives decision making of the key actors (Germany's WW1 strategy prioritizing a westward rush due to expectations of Russian mobilization; modern Eastern European lobbying to expand NATO in the post Cold War).
This matters to your Russia-American metaphor because the roles in the current era really aren't analogous to either WW1 or Thucydides Trap due to the relevance of other actors. The US is not the actor who felt a need to pre-empt a specific threat (the German allusion to WW1), nor was it trying to displace a hegemon / at risk of being displaced as a hegemon by Russia in Ukraine.
The model also struggles to recognize how doctrine and strategy interact, and yet don't substitute for eachother, and how a doctrine predicated on a form of offense can lead to bad strategy and unwise conflict. In WW1, Germany was caught up in what was sometimes referred to as the cult of the offense- the idea that with elan and alacrity and modern military planning you could blitz the enemy to submission much faster and cheaply than a methodical campaign. This, in turn, would let you fight greater opposing forces, since you could knock out some (say France and thus Britain) early enough to focus on the rest (Russia). There was reason to believe this was possible- German offensives had beaten the French before, and would again nearly 30 years later- but this is a tactic that became a strategy by necessity. This was because the Kaiser German military context kept getting worse and worse, because the willingness to aggressively push personal interests at the expense of others created coalitions that wouldn't have formed had other actors felt at risk. The greater the potential coalitions became, the greater the appeal of the cult of the offense to negate that disadvantage. By WW1, German planners largely thought Russia was a massive threat that would take their full focus and thus couldn't be faced with France at the same time... hence the intent to knock out France first. But doing so required going through Belgium, which is what got Britain into the war that it otherwise would have likely sat out on. The Germans took a calculated risk, but boy were they were bad at math because not even they recognized the implications of the technologies available, and that their own strategy built on past success was putting them in a bad strategic context.
This matters to your modern example because Russia was/is in the thrall of its own version of the cult of the offense. Call it the cult of the asymmetric spook. Putin had enough success with small-scale unconventional / special operations that it not only became a Russian advantage, but the entire Russian strategy for Ukraine. The reason so many people publicly doubted the pre-invasion American warnings was because it would be monumentally stupid to go up with a force like that with what Russia had assembled. But Putin was convinced his special military operation successes in the past would work again, and lo and behold when it didn't the strategy crashed and burned.
By contrast, the American comparison to this metaphor isn't Germany in WW1, but far closer to... America in WW1, where the American center of power was never at meaningful threat, and potential threat-rivals devastated themselves while the American political debate was how much favoritism to show the generally favored side without actually entering the war.
Which goes to the final point, leader competence.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but WW1's Kaiser Wilhelm was a certain kind of an idiot- an aggressive idiot. Aggressive foreign policy got him results he otherwise wouldn't have had he been more passive, but who also created the foundations for the coalition that would encircle him, and the willingness of everyone to not only fight back but to help others keep beating his forces up well after the initial bloody nose. Wilhelm's incompetence wasn't just in choosing a bad war, but in the choices that led to Germany's isolation in Europe leading up to this, and the strategic options available to him as a result of his shaping of the local international environment to a point where allies were mercurial at best.
From this position- where the military facts were against him, and the coalitions surrounding him, and victory hinged on a trump card succeeding without issue- Wilhelm then doubled down on a weak hand.
This matters to your example because, again, the historical analog here isn't the US to Germany, or even the US to Britain, but Russia to the worst aspects of WW1 Germany.
That people will take him seriously, not literally. And/or pay attention to other things that he's said in the past, such as his conditional willingness to further supply Ukraine if Russia doesn't agree to reasonable terms, various formulations of which Russia has to date rejected as unreasonable.
Thanks a lot for this detailed reply! I am only vaguely aware of any of this stuff. Can you recommend a good book on WW1 to learn more?
Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984; by Jack Snyder. Here is a summary
The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War; by Stephen Van Evera. Here's a link to a summary... and of some other military history education sources.
Here is a thesis from an American Airforce officer on the Cult of the Offense as it applies to airpower.
I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before. Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.
To follow on @Dean's point on wars of conquest being too expensive to be profitable, there was also increasing traction among politicians and economists that the costs of holding foreign territory started outweighing the trade/taxes accrued from said territory. I don't have the specific literature, but Adam Smiths economic treatises regularly castigated colonial adventures as foolish, with no economic case for them due to the high frictional costs of maintaining economically leaky endeavors.
As technology improved and accessibility to said technology extended beyond European borders, the strength of relative threats diminished the European technological advantages severely. There is no point keeping a garrison in Hong Kong if the Chinese can attack strongpoints with artillery instead of swords. There is no point in keeping a Kabul FOB if the Taliban can overrun adjacent ANA positions with a text message and plink potshots eternally at US troops without consequence, etc etc.
The last major power to engage in a colonialist land grab (outside of Putin) was funny moustache man, and all his lebensraum would have lain fallow if he did not have a cooperative population working it maximally for his advantage The Russians slow worked under an ostensibly beneficial communist system simply because the communist system had unworkable incentives, theres no way they would have functioned as a slave people to faraway teutons.
Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.
I think the critical point is that imperialism doesn't pay if you have to pay your own troops first-world wages. Kipling in Arithmetic on the Frontier is already suggesting that the British Empire on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border was money-losing for this reason in 1886. The situation gets worse, to the point where (even with the oil) the cost to the US taxpayer of being in Iraq was of the same order of magnitude as the total GDP of Iraq.
Profitable small-scale imperialism (called "warlordism") is still going on in the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where child soldiers cost a dollar a day.
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Historically the value of land and borders would have been tied to the people within the land that could be taxed, or chokepoints (ports, passes, bridges) that would keep the people or goods within a boundary to be taxed. A shitload of fertile plains is useless if peasants cannot work it, a shitload of peasants are useless if there is no land for them to work on. People are taxable, land is not. The Congo slavers sold captured slaves because their shitty land was unsuitable for agriculture in the short term, and these captives could be traded for horses guns and shinies that the congolese valued more than the ransoms of inland captures.
We also have to recognize that modern economic concepts like gross domestic product or national output is also a reflection of modernized sociopolitical advancements that allow quantification and tracking of inputs and outputs. A theoretical value of captured land has no real value if the local taxman and the taxpayer all collude to deprive the faraway sovereign of their dues.
In modern terms, the pre-Smith British view of Mercantilist economic victory was 'everyone buys my stuff', which reflects producer superiority and is the focus of trade wars. Smith and later Ricardo explored the theories of trade and comparative advantage to obtain maximal utility (US makes soybeans cheaply, so it should sell them to the Chinese who make plastic crap cheaply for mutual benefit), and this combined with the realization that colonies really were exercises in impoverishment to diminish the appeal of colonization or indeed other proximate wars.
The USA may have actually entered a hitherto unseen economic victory condition, where 'everyone wants to sell to me'. By being the buyer of highest priority, outsiders comport their own supply chains and production processes to the buyers preferences even without the buyer explicating as such. Japanese clothing giants commission Bangladeshi muslims to sew pride flags onto blue eyed blonde barbie dolls because the USA is the buyer they all aim to satisfy, not their impoverished kin or insignificant neighbours.
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Historian Bret Devereaux on his blog wrote about the status quo coalition which is a somewhat related idea; he has a similar bit about how returns from development outpace returns from conquest in the modern era, making modern wars of conquest not economically worthwhile.
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I would strongly (and warmly) recommend reading up on it. More than a specific historical context, the Cult of the Offensive is a mindset that can be observed across periods of time, and is an example of a strategic paradigm that can simultaneously be logical (because premise can be true and valid) and illogical (because the consequences of adopting the paradigm include negative externalities that make it illogical to embrace).
Rather than scandalous, the more relevant point is 'too expensive to be profitable.'
The British and American formal empires fell because of scandal. The sense of self of what it meant to be 'civilized' precluded arbitrary and extreme uses of force, and political-ideological senses of legitimacy and democracy asserted self-limitations that, eventually, led them to no longer want to militarily enforce rule and so negotiate exits.
That negotiation- and the experience of other conquerors- was in the context that insurgencies were increasingly cheap and bloodily effective and incurring huge costs. Starting with post-WW2 military surpluses, but then expanding with the Cold War military-industrial complexes, advanced and effective and relatively portable weapons made armed resistance a real and feasible thing. The AK-47 is perhaps the hallmark of a cheap and effective peasant-usable weapon, and further advances in explosives and communications and plenty of safe support zones made supplying insurgencies very easy for anyone who either sympathized with a target, or wanted to counter an aggressor. These costs could be economically ruinous and politically disruptive.
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Nationalism. There's a belief that there exists a set of people who are Germans/Czechs/Poles/Frenchmen/etc. And that the goal of international policy is, where reasonable and within constraints, to draw a circle around each group of people and allow them to form a nation state. This is a myth, the circle can't exist absent state violence, and indeed the people mostly don't exist without state violence.
The idea of conquest in an age of nationalism means either genocide or slavery. In an age of monarchy it merely means adding subjects.
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American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).
That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.
Since WWII, who’s gotten away with land grabs via military invasion? I’m only aware of Russia in Crimea, and even that was more of a coup than a traditional military invasion and occupation like the War of 1870.
Off the top of my head there’s the 1951 Chinese annexation of Tibet, the various land grabs between Israel and its neighbours, the 1961 annexation of Goa by India, and the 1975 Indonesia annexation of East Timor. Depending how you frame it the Vietnam war ended either with North Vietnam annexing South Vietnam or the reunification of a single nation split by civil war.
There’s also been failed annexation attempts post ww2, like the 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Great list, thanks. I suppose Tibetan independence after the collapse of the Qing was never internationally recognized, so legally that’s more of an internal matter than an international annexation.
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