Thucydides Trap

Based on Wikipedia: Thucydides Trap

When Rising Powers Meet Ruling Powers

Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek historian watched his world burn. Thucydides, an Athenian general turned chronicler, witnessed the catastrophic war between Athens and Sparta that reshaped the ancient Mediterranean. His diagnosis was chillingly simple: "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable."

That single sentence has echoed through the centuries, and today it haunts the corridors of power in Washington and Beijing.

In 2011, an American political scientist named Graham Allison dusted off Thucydides and gave his ancient warning a modern name: the Thucydides Trap. The idea is straightforward. When a rising power threatens to displace the dominant power of its era, the resulting tension creates conditions that make war terrifyingly likely. Not inevitable, Allison insists, but likely enough that avoiding it requires extraordinary diplomatic effort and wisdom.

The concept exploded in popularity around 2015, for one obvious reason: China.

The Numbers That Shook Washington

Allison didn't just coin a catchy phrase. He led a research team at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to test whether history supported his theory. They identified sixteen cases over the past five centuries where a rising power challenged a ruling power.

Twelve of those sixteen ended in war.

That's a seventy-five percent failure rate for peace. The list reads like a catalog of history's bloodiest chapters: Portugal versus Spain in the late fifteenth century, France versus the Habsburgs in the sixteenth, the Dutch Republic challenging Spain, Britain's rise against the Dutch, France under Louis XIV against multiple European powers, Britain versus France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France under Napoleon versus Britain again, France and Britain against Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, Germany's rise against France, Germany's challenge to Britain before World War One, the Soviet Union and its allies against Germany and Japan in World War Two, Japan versus the United States in the Pacific War, and the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and America.

The four cases that avoided war? Britain's accommodation of America's rise in the early twentieth century. America's peaceful ascendancy over Britain after World War Two. The Soviet Union's acceptance of Germany's reunification. And Britain and France's acquiescence to Germany's post-Cold War emergence as Europe's leading economy.

Notice something about those peaceful transitions? Three of the four involved democracies recognizing other democracies. The fourth involved a declining Soviet Union that had little choice.

Why This Matters Now

The Thucydides Trap has become, in the words of foreign policy scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, "canonical"—a truism invoked "ad nauseam" in discussions of American-Chinese rivalry. BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus has observed that Allison's 2017 book expanding on the concept, Destined for War, "has become required reading for many policymakers, academics and journalists."

Even Chinese leader Xi Jinping has used the term. "We all need to work together to avoid the Thucydides trap," he cautioned.

The tensions are real and multiplying. Taiwan's continued independence, backed by Western powers, remains the flashpoint that could ignite actual conflict. China's expanding naval presence in the Pacific and its claims over the South China Sea challenge American dominance in waters far from the United States but close to China. Cyber espionage, trade wars, human rights disputes over Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong—the list of friction points grows longer each year.

In 2018, when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on nearly half of China's exports to America, triggering a trade war, the Thucydides Trap suddenly seemed less like an academic theory and more like a live diagnosis.

The Case Against Ancient Wisdom

But not everyone is convinced that a theory born in ancient Greece applies to a world of nuclear weapons, global trade, and the internet.

The critiques fall into several categories, and some are devastating.

First, there's the problem of whether China is actually rising in the way the theory requires. Lawrence Freedman, writing in Prism, the National Defense University's journal, argues that China's primary interest has always been regional. If that's true, then time is on China's side—its economic gravity will pull its neighbors closer regardless of military confrontation. Why fight when you can wait?

Hu Bo, one of China's leading naval strategists at Peking University, has said he doesn't believe the current balance of power between America and China actually fits the Thucydides pattern.

Some analysts go further, arguing that China is far too weak for such a conflict. They point to economic vulnerabilities, an aging population, environmental degradation, a military still inferior to America's, a weaker network of alliances, and a censorship regime that stifles the innovation modern warfare requires. Brands and Beckley contend that the Thucydides Trap "fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development." They argue that China, not America, faces impending stagnation.

This is a crucial distinction. A rising power acts one way. A peaking power that fears decline acts quite differently.

The Peak Power Problem

Brands and Beckley offer an alternative theory that turns the Thucydides Trap on its head. They argue that many of history's great conflicts weren't caused by a rising power threatening a ruling power. Instead, they were caused by a once-rising power that had peaked and saw its window of opportunity closing.

Think about it. A genuinely rising power should be patient. If you're getting stronger every year, why pick a fight today when you'll be even more formidable tomorrow? The rational move is to wait.

But a peaking power faces the opposite calculus. If your best days are behind you, if your economy is slowing, if your rivals are organizing against you, then delay only makes things worse. The temptation to act boldly—even recklessly—becomes overwhelming. Grab what you can before it's too late.

Brands and Beckley argue that this pattern, not the classic Thucydides Trap, explains the Russo-Japanese War, World War One, and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Germany in 1914 wasn't just challenging British hegemony; it was terrified of Russia's rapid industrialization and the growing Slavic nationalism that threatened Austria-Hungary. Japan in 1941 wasn't a rising power confident of eventual victory; it was a nation whose expansion had been checked by American embargoes and which calculated that its military advantage would only shrink with time.

If China is peaking rather than rising—and there's substantial evidence for this view—then the danger isn't that China will patiently accumulate power until it eclipses America. The danger is that China might lash out as it senses its moment slipping away.

Did Allison Get His History Wrong?

The criticisms don't stop at theory. Several scholars have challenged the historical accuracy of Allison's case studies.

Joseph Nye, also a Harvard political scientist, argues that Allison misidentifies what actually caused several of his wars. Take World War One. Yes, Germany was rising and Britain was the established power. But the war was also driven by German fear of Russian power, Austro-Hungarian fear of Slavic nationalism, and a cascade of miscalculations that had little to do with the simple rising-versus-ruling dynamic.

Historian Arthur Waldron points to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which Allison includes as a case of the Thucydides Trap. But wait—Japan was the rising power, and Russia was the established one. If the Thucydides Trap were operating as advertised, wouldn't Russia have attacked Japan to prevent its rise? Instead, Japan launched a surprise attack on Russia. The pattern doesn't fit.

Freedman similarly argues that Allison misunderstands World War One, which he sees as resulting more from the dispute between Austria and Serbia, disastrously mismanaged by their allies Germany and Russia, than from any simple clash between a rising and ruling power.

And Did He Get Thucydides Wrong?

Here's where the critique becomes almost poetic. Some scholars argue that Allison misread not just modern history but the very ancient text he claims to be channeling.

Donald Kagan, a Yale historian who devoted his career to studying the Peloponnesian War, and Ernst Badian, a Harvard classicist, both argued that the war wasn't really caused by Athens' rise threatening Sparta. By the time of the war, Athens had stopped rising. It was the stagnation of Athens, and a series of Athenian policy blunders, that convinced Sparta the war was worth the risk.

Sound familiar? That's the peaking power problem again, lurking in the very text Allison uses to support his theory.

Alan Greeley Misenheimer, in a case study for the Institute for National Strategic Studies, delivers perhaps the sharpest critique: "Thucydides' text does not support Allison's normative assertion about the 'inevitable' result of an encounter between 'rising' and 'ruling' powers."

Academic Jeffrey Crean argues that Allison misses Thucydides' actual core lesson entirely. For Thucydides, the greatest threat to a great power comes from within. His history reads as a tragedy, with the turning point coming when a hubristic Athens overreached by trying to conquer Syracuse—a distant city far from Athenian interests. That disastrous expedition exemplified democracy devolving into mob psychology, and it ultimately allowed Sparta to win.

The lesson isn't that rising powers inevitably clash with ruling powers. The lesson is that great powers destroy themselves through arrogance and overreach.

The Propaganda Question

There's one more wrinkle worth considering. Some observers have noted that Chinese state media has enthusiastically embraced the Thucydides Trap narrative.

Why would Beijing promote a theory that seems to predict conflict? Perhaps because the theory frames China as the inevitable rising power—the Athens of our era—while casting America as the fearful, declining Sparta. That framing serves Chinese interests regardless of whether war actually comes. It presents Chinese assertiveness as natural and American resistance as neurotic.

The narrative also subtly shifts responsibility. If conflict comes, it's because of a structural trap, not Chinese choices. The theory can become, in effect, a sophisticated form of blame-shifting.

What Ancient Greece Can't Tell Us

James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an article with the memorable title "Oh God, Not the Peloponnesian War Again." His argument: "Conflicts between city-states in a backwater Eurasian promontory 2,400 years ago are an unreliable guide to modern geopolitics—and they neglect a vast span of world history that may be far more relevant."

He added, somewhat wickedly, that Thucydides should not "hold the same grip on international relations scholars that Harry Potter does on millennial readers."

Palmer has a point. The world of nuclear weapons, mutually assured destruction, economic interdependence, and instant global communication is radically different from the world of triremes and hoplites. The factors that might restrain a modern great power conflict—the catastrophic costs of nuclear war, the economic devastation of severing supply chains, the transparency created by satellites and social media—simply didn't exist in the ancient Mediterranean.

Scholar David Daokai Li makes a related argument. The Thucydides Trap theory is built on Western and Ancient Greek analogies. Examples like Germany in the 1910s, Li argues, are considerably different from contemporary China—a civilization with its own distinct strategic culture and historical experience.

Classicist Victor Davis Hanson's Insight

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, offers a different critique. He notes that a rising power doesn't always provoke a preemptive attack from an established power. The key variable, he suggests, is whether the two powers share fundamental values and systems.

Consider Britain and America. By the early twentieth century, it was clear that the United States would eventually surpass Britain as the world's preeminent power. Yet Britain never seriously considered war to prevent American rise. Why? Because the two nations shared democratic governance, common law traditions, the English language, and broadly compatible views of the international order. Britain could accept American hegemony because American hegemony wouldn't threaten British values or way of life.

Now consider America and China. The two nations have fundamentally different political systems—one a liberal democracy, the other a one-party authoritarian state. They have different economic philosophies, different approaches to human rights, different visions of how the international order should be organized. Even if there were no military competition, even if there were no Taiwan, these differences would create friction.

The Thucydides Trap may be less about rising versus ruling powers and more about incompatible powers—nations whose fundamental values are so different that one's success inherently threatens the other's legitimacy.

The Kindleberger Alternative

Joseph Nye has proposed a different trap to worry about: the Kindleberger Trap, named after economist Charles Kindleberger, who analyzed the Great Depression.

Kindleberger argued that the global economic collapse of the 1930s was worsened because no nation was willing to provide global public goods—stable currency, open trade, lending of last resort—that the international system required. Britain was too weak to continue its traditional role, and America was unwilling to assume it.

The Kindleberger Trap suggests that the real danger isn't a rising China challenging American hegemony. It's a weakening China—or a retreating America—leaving a vacuum in global leadership that no one fills. In this scenario, the international system doesn't collapse because of a clash between great powers. It collapses because the great powers turn inward and stop maintaining the rules and institutions that keep global trade and security functioning.

This may be a more realistic fear. As of the mid-2020s, both America and China show signs of domestic preoccupation. America is polarized, with significant political movements skeptical of international commitments. China faces economic headwinds, demographic decline, and the challenge of maintaining growth while tightening political control.

So Is War Inevitable?

No. And notably, Graham Allison himself never said it was. His whole point in popularizing the Thucydides Trap was to warn that avoiding war requires extraordinary effort—not to predict that war is predetermined.

The historical record, messy as it is, offers some hope. Four of Allison's sixteen cases avoided war. The Cold War between America and the Soviet Union—arguably the most dangerous great power rivalry in history—ended without direct military conflict. Nuclear weapons may have created a deterrent so terrifying that rational actors simply cannot choose war.

Economic interdependence adds another layer of restraint. America and China are not just rivals; they are each other's largest trading partners. A war between them would devastate the global economy in ways that would harm both nations for generations. This doesn't make war impossible, but it raises its costs to levels that ancient Greeks could never have imagined.

And yet the critics are right to point out that the Thucydides Trap, as a predictive tool, has serious limitations. It may be less a trap and more a warning—useful for focusing minds on the dangers of great power competition, but not a reliable guide to what will actually happen.

What Thucydides Actually Teaches

Perhaps the most important lesson from Thucydides isn't about rising and ruling powers at all. It's about the human tendency toward hubris—the arrogant overconfidence that leads great powers to overreach, to mistake their moment of strength for permanent superiority, to launch catastrophic adventures that destroy the very power they sought to preserve.

Athens didn't lose the Peloponnesian War because Sparta was destined to defeat it. Athens lost because it made terrible decisions—the expedition to Syracuse being the most catastrophic. A democracy swept up in enthusiasm for conquest, unwilling to hear warnings, punishing dissenters, convinced of its own invincibility.

That's a lesson both Washington and Beijing might consider. The greatest threat to American power might not be Chinese rise but American overreach or internal division. The greatest threat to Chinese power might not be American containment but Chinese rigidity and overconfidence.

Thucydides wrote his history, he said, as "a possession for all time." He wanted future generations to recognize the patterns of human behavior that lead to tragedy. Whether or not the Thucydides Trap is a valid analytical framework, the underlying warning remains urgent: great powers can stumble into catastrophic conflicts through fear, miscalculation, and the arrogance of assuming that strength today guarantees strength tomorrow.

The trap, in the end, may be less about the structure of international politics and more about the structure of human nature itself.