Thucydides's Trap

Chinese analysts, from President Xi Jinping on down, have nominally rejected Allison’s pessimistic analysis. “There is no Thucydides Trap,” Xi has argued, claiming that he had devised an alternative “new type of great-power relations” that would avoid war by recognizing that each Asian giant had its own legitimate interests. More recently, he has shifted to arguing that “China and the U.S. must do everything possible to avoid [the] Thucydides Trap.”

Senator Dan Sullivan (R - Alaska) discusses Graham Allison's book Destined for War: Can American and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? during a senate session on May 8, 2017.

For two Presidents who pride themselves as masters of the art of the deal, is there a potential bargain to be struck at Mar-a-Lago that could contain the North Korea crisis and point Beijing and Washington away from war? Potentially. 

Indeed, an essential element in the Chinese art of the deal is guanxi. In many cases, this includes direct payments to another leader that in English law tradition would be called bribes.

What made war “inevitable” was the tectonic structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one ― a phenomenon I’ve described as “Thucydides’s Trap.”

If Trump and Xi fail to find a way to join in acting decisively to contain this threat, we will all have good reason to fear a rush of events as consequential as those that upended Woodrow Wilson.

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.