Thucydides's Trap

An approach that requires the United States to accept what it longed deemed “unacceptable” will strike many people in Washington as irresponsible.

In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today.

I am handing the baton to Ash and Eric for the next lap of the race, confident that the best for the Belfer Center is yet to come.

A group of top-level American and Japanese academics and officials gathered for a Belfer Center conference in March to discuss the U.S.-Japan alliance and the rise of China.

Never before has a nation risen so fast on so many dimensions. 

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.

Graham Allison, veteran foreign policy analyst at Harvard’s Kennedy School, warns us about the dangers of new power players caught in an old game. The so-called “Thucydides Trap,” Allison explains, is a predictable pattern of conflict that crops up when rising and declining powers meet on the staircase of international hierarchy. Whether it’s Athens and Sparta in Thucydides’s day, or the U.S. and China today, the conflicts in these scenarios seem almost inevitable.

Belfer Center Director Graham Allison's forthcoming book examines the potential for a war to erupt between the U.S. and China.

WAR BETWEEN the United States and China is not inevitable, writes Graham Allison, "but it is certainly possible. Indeed, as these scenarios illustrate, the underlying stress created by China’s disruptive rise creates conditions in which accidental, otherwise inconsequential events could trigger a large-scale conflict. That outcome is not preordained: out of the sixteen cases of Thucydides’s Trap over the last five hundred years, war was averted four times. But avoiding war will require statecraft as subtle as that of the British in dealing with a rising America a century ago, or the wise men that crafted a Cold War strategy to meet the Soviet Union’s surge without bombs or bullets. Whether Chinese and American leaders can rise to this challenge is an open question. What is certain is that the fate of the world rests upon the answer."