Opinion | Europe risks a self-fulfilling prophecy of war with Russia

War drums not heard in half a century are beating across Europe. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned that Europe “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great grandparents endured”. British and French defence chiefs have urged their respective nations to be ready to lose children in the fight against Russia. Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 warns of a “grey zone” between war and peace, citing threats from Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin accuses Europe of being the aggressor and Nato of preparing to attack Russia. Both sides share an assumption that, as one TV analysis unreflectively concluded, the best way to avert war is to prepare for it.

History suggests otherwise: war preparations often make conflict a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the building of China’s Great Wall to the Anglo-German naval arms race and Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour to the Six Day War, readying for conflict can fuel a chain of suspicion that brings about the very strike it was supposed to deter.

The classical warning comes from Thucydides, who traced the Peloponnesian War to the rise of Athenian power and the fear this struck in Sparta. This historical example was elevated into a geopolitical theory called the “Thucydides Trap”, popularised by US political scientist Graham Allison. It says that geopolitical change will lock rival states into defensive military alliances and strategic manoeuvres to deter war. However, such policies risk increasing suspicion and normalising the prospect of conflict, mutating deterrent into a self-fulfilling prophecy of war.

Allison popularised the term through its application to US-China relations. However, it also captures the situation in Europe: concern about an aggressive Russia has sparked fear in Europe, resulting in militarisation and attempts to ready the population for conflict. This rhetoric has further alarmed Moscow, which has begun to suspect that an attack is imminent, a response which further alarms Europe. Deterrence has intensified suspicion, and the remote prospect of war has become an increasingly normalised reality.

We must never forget Thucydides’ central message: war is an avoidable tragedy. His history of the Peloponnesian War is a narrative of how compounded fear and hardened hearts, normalised to the prospect of conflict, create a tide of war. Amid this narrative are the many moments where individuals, if given an opportunity to apply sober judgment and reason, could have found a peaceful path, but they were ultimately swept away by this tide.