Thucydides Trap

The Thucydides Trap is a concept originated by Herman Wouk, the novelist and World War II veteran, who used it in his Admiral Raymond A. Spruance lecture, delivered on April 16, 1980, at the U.S. Naval War College. Wouk compared the U.S.-Soviet Cold War to the "cold war" that developed between Athens and Sparta once they had defeated Persia, their common enemy, remarking:And more than two millenia [sic] later we seem still trapped in Thucydides' world. None of the ways in which those quarrelsom