I'm John Bachelor with Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang and our colleague Steve Yates, the Heritage Foundation,

and put on your classical hat, gentlemen. We're going to the land of classics professors.

Recently had a wonderful conversation with a young classics professor University of Birmingham,

Andrew Bayliss, who has a new book out about Sparta, the history of

Sparta from a thousand B.C.E. till the fall of Spartan power in the 4th century BC, defeated by

Thebes. And the Thucydides trap comes up in common parlance now, in geopolitical circles.

It's considered extremely educated at the Council on

Foreign Relations to debate the matter. Strikingly, in the last meeting between the president

of the United States and the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Ms. Xi Jinping, it was mentioned.

She went out of his way to say, I don't believe it, and Mr. Trump agreed

with him. I don't believe it either. Well, it's going to surprise everybody to hear. It turns

out the classics professor agree with the presidents. There is no Thucydides trap. It is an invention

of a very clever man, a scholar, who took lucid's and turned him sideways with presumptions of the

language. Here's the Thucydides trap as presented in geopolitical circles these last years.

A rising power will always tangle with the superpower, always, and it's inevitable. inevitable that is the way you replace the superpower that

ages and weakens and becomes corrupt the lucidity's trap is said to be in place for 2,500 years this is

5th century 4th century bc e century BCE, Athens and Sparta.

Sparta was considered the superpower, and Athens was the rising power.

Now, importantly, none of the details match up to this.

I'm just giving you a broad sweep.

It turns out, according to the classics professors, and there's unanimity among them,

that the reason Athens and Sparta went to war was nothing to do with rising power.

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