Thucydides’ Trap—the idea that a rising power and an anxious hegemon are fated to collide—has become the go-to shorthand for understanding China and the United States, invoked even by Xi Jinping himself. But strip away the rhetorical power of the ancient Greek analogy, and the case for inevitable conflict looks far shakier than its popularity suggests.
In his recent meeting with US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping remarked “The world has come to another crossroads.” Xi then asked: “Can China and the U.S. overcome the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm of major-country relations?”
Thucydides’ Trap
It seems strange to find the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party citing a classical Greek historian of 2,500 years ago. What happened to Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius, and Sun Tzu?
Nevertheless, Xi’s reference shows that Thucydides’ Trap has emerged as a popular global meme describing the current relationship between China and the United States. Xi uses it rhetorically and directly to address Donald Trump in terms understandable to Americans and couched in the respectability of elite Western scholarship.
Thucydides’ Trap has been a popular trope in US discourse on Sino-American relations. It was popularised by Harvard Professor Graham Allison, referring to the elevated danger of war when a rising power catches up to an incumbent hegemon. Allison introduced this analogy from ancient Greece to alert us to the risk of a Sino-American armed conflict in today’s world. He reported that in his inventory of sixteen power transitions in the past 500 years, twelve ended in war.
Thucydides’ Trap is an analogy that uses the rivalry between Athens and Sparta as an example to suggest an elevated danger of war when a rising power catches up to an established hegemon. It applies classical text to the current situation of China and the United States.
Analytical Reasoning
Analogies can be beguiling, but they can also mislead and misrepresent. A deeper analysis of this analogy reveals an array of analytical flaws.
First, there is a false contextual equivalence. Thucydides is remembered nowadays mainly for his aphorism that the Peloponnesian War stemmed from the rise of Athens and the fear it engendered in Sparta.
How appropriate is ancient Sparta a replica of contemporary US? Sparta is known for its martial spirit, a formidable land power with its hoplites fighting in phalanx formations. It was also an oligarchy living in constant fear of slave rebellion. Does ancient Athens—the cradle of Western democracy, and an expanding maritime empire thriving on seaborne commerce—offer a valid analogue to today’s China?
Further, developments since Thucydides’ time, such as the advent of mass societies, nationalism, nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence, have made facile parallels between then and now problematic.
Second, monocausal explanations of complex socio-political phenomena are inherently suspect. Power transitions are only one element in a larger mosaic. Like other such phenomena, wars stem from a confluence of factors, with power transition being only one, albeit perhaps an important, contributor.
Power transitions among leading states are neither sufficient nor necessary for wars to happen. Wars are too complicated to be captured by simplistic, bivariate formulations. Germany, Japan, and China have overtaken the USSR/Russia, Britain, and France in recent decades without war breaking out. In fact, in the one and only instance in modern history when international leadership exchanged hands—the case of US displacing the UK as the reigning global hegemon—peace endured. The warning of Thucydides’ Trap is a false alarm in this most obvious and critical test.
Third, timing is also a factor. Few American scholars have paused to ask why the rising power should not bide its time and let the ongoing trend be its friend (that is, to enable its further ascent). They also do not ask why the incumbent hegemon should be wedded to the existing international order even though it has suffered decline under its auspices. Why not change the rules of this order to enable it to arrest and even reverse its decline?
The meme of Thucydides’ Trap is far from the whole or even the most important take-away from Thucydides’ rich and nuanced account of the Peloponnesian War, alerting his readers to multiple causes of war, including the pull of foreign entanglements, the push of domestic politics, and of course, human foibles such as anger, pride, and hubris. There are multiple pathways to war rather than just a single one. This is the concept of equifinality. Among the many nuggets of Thucydides’ rendition of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles had told his fellow Athenians that he was more worried by their own self-defeating policies than their adversary’s clever strategies.
One should not substitute assertion for analysis, such as alleging China’s revisionism or America’s possible decline at the start of an inquiry rather than as a conclusion following an evidenced-based study. We should not settle empirical issues by rhetorical fiat or categorical definition. It may just be possible that China is more committed to the existing international order than the US, which under Trump has been dismantling it. Indeed, in many ways Washington in a Trump administration has been acting more like the construct of a revisionist, increasingly assertive Beijing typically featured in the dominant US narrative.
Blind Spots and Pitfalls
The analogy of Thucydides’ Trap has major analytic defects as a putative cause of war–including its exclusive focus on power shifts among leading states, its dubious assumption of equivalence between ancient Greece and the contemporary world, its questionable attribution of leading states’ motivations, its vague and arbitrary definition and measurement of national power, and its neglect of timing effects.
Moreover, structural explanations of war, such as Thucydides’ Trap with its singular focus on the interstate balance of power, imply that people never learn. They argue essentially that when officials are placed in the same circumstances, they will repeat the same mistakes time and again.
Yet the rhetorical power of the analogy exists in spite of its many defects, and the analogy between ancient Greece and the world of the 21st century still seems strangely compelling.
Analogies have a powerful influence on officials’ decision making and they play an important role in mobilising public support for policies favored by officials. They frame actors, China as a rising power, the US as a declining one. They imply problems, offer solutions, and serve as mental shortcuts—human beings are cognitive misers. They also rally public support by presenting a compelling narrative or script. Yet this is also a major reason why they can misguide. Two most powerful recent examples of reasoning by analogy have been the (mis)application of the supposed lesson of Munich against appeasement leading to US military interventions in Korea and Vietnam.
The danger posed by Thucydides’ Trap is that leaders may believe in this simplistic formulation, thereby creating a self-fulling prophecy. It slights leaders’ agency. Structural conditions may pull and shove, but people make decisions—as Xi’s remark reminds us. The Chinese and American people and their leaders remain co-authors of their future. If China and the United States blunder into a war, the fault is not in our stars.
Francis A. Beer is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his A. B. (1960) from Harvard and M. A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1967) from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he has been associated in different ways with the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques and the University of Bordeaux in France; the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands; the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom; the Ohio State University, the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Texas in the United States.
Steve Chan is College Professor of Distinction Emeritus and formerly chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests focus on international relations, political economy, foreign policy, decision-making, East Asia, and especially Sino-American relations. His publications include thirty books and over two hundred articles and chapters.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
