Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Abstract

In the book, Graham Allison warns that ‘the war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognized’. His core concept is ‘Thucydides’ Trap’. This metaphor is based on the well-known quote from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War: ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.’ Allison argues that the friction between the United States and China (People’s Republic of China) will result in cataclysmic war unless the two states take difficult and painful actions to avert it. The concept of Thucydides’s Trap holds that when a rising power threatens to displace the existing dominant power, collision between those two powers becomes highly possible. The rising state increasingly asserts itself and demands recognition and respect, while the declining established power is seized with a sense of fear and insecurity. Under these conditions, even trivial flashpoints between powers can trigger large-scale conflict. Allison identified 16 cases over the last 500 years in which rising power challenged the position of a hegemon, and found that 12 of these cases resulted in war.