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

Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard's Kennedy School and a former assistant secretary of defense, argues that the United States and China are on a collision course driven by the same structural dynamic the ancient Greek historian Thucydides identified 2,500 years ago. Thucydides observed that the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was caused not by any single provocation but by a deeper force: "the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable" (xiv). Allison labels this recurring pattern "Thucydides's Trap": the structural stress that results when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one. Through the Harvard Thucydides's Trap Project, his researchers identified 16 such cases over the past 500 years; 12 ended in war and only 4 did not. Allison also draws on the outbreak of World War I and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to show how structural stress can transform manageable incidents into catastrophes and how wise leadership can avert them.

Allison devotes Part One to the scale of China's transformation. Citing Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding leader and a trusted counselor to every Chinese leader from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, Allison relays Lee's assessment that China is "the biggest player in the history of the world" (6). China's GDP grew from less than $300 billion in 1980 to $11 trillion by 2015. Measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), the standard the International Monetary Fund (IMF) uses to compare national economies, China surpassed the United States as the world's largest economy in 2014. China built the equivalent of Europe's entire housing stock in 15 years, constructed more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined, and lifted more than half a billion people out of extreme poverty. This economic surge fueled a military buildup: China's defense budget became the world's second largest, and a 2015 RAND Corporation study found that China was approaching parity with the United States in conventional military capability in its region.

To illustrate the dynamics that make power shifts dangerous, Allison reconstructs the original instance of Thucydides's Trap. After combining forces to repel the Persian invasion, Athens and Sparta managed their competition peacefully for decades. Athens, however, continued to expand its maritime empire, breeding demands for greater recognition. Sparta, a conservative military culture focused on the status quo, viewed these demands with mounting alarm. When Corinth, a key Spartan ally, provoked a conflict with neutral Corcyra in 435 BCE, Athens sent a small, symbolic fleet to support Corcyra, a gesture that proved too weak to deter but strong enough to provoke. A parallel dispute over Athens's economic sanctions against Megara brought tensions to a head, and the Spartan Assembly voted for war because they feared "the further growth of Athenian power" (37).

Allison surveys additional cases to show how this dynamic recurs across centuries. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was a desperate response to American economic sanctions, particularly an oil embargo, that Japan's leaders viewed as an existential threat. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck deliberately provoked France into declaring war in 1870, calculating that the conflict would unite the German principalities into a single nation. In the seventeenth century, England's naval buildup challenged the Dutch Republic's trading dominance, leading to three wars in less than a quarter century.

The case Allison treats most extensively is the Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, which he presents as the closest historical analogue to the current US-China competition. After unification in 1871, Germany surged past Britain in industrial output and scientific achievement. Kaiser Wilhelm II embarked on a massive naval buildup under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, and for Britain, whose global empire depended on naval supremacy, the German fleet posed an existential threat. The Foreign Office's Eyre Crowe concluded in a 1907 memorandum that Germany's intentions were irrelevant; its growing capabilities were what mattered. A second Thucydidean dynamic then interlocked with the first: Russia's rapid military expansion threatened to overwhelm Germany by 1917, encouraging German leaders to espouse preventive war. When the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary triggered a crisis in the Balkans, Germany's unconditional support for Austria-Hungary set off a cascade of alliance commitments that pulled all of Europe into war.

To provide perspective on Chinese assertiveness, Allison examines America's own rise under Theodore Roosevelt. The United States declared war on Spain in 1898 and expelled it from the Western Hemisphere, issued an ultimatum to Germany over Venezuela in 1902, backed an insurrection in Colombia to create Panama and build a canal, and pressured Britain into conceding the Alaska boundary dispute. In his 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt declared that the United States had assumed "international police power" in the Western Hemisphere, and US marines or warships intervened in Latin America 21 times in the 30 years that followed. Allison argues that if China were to become even half as demanding as the United States was during its own rise, the rivalry would be far more dangerous.

Allison then turns to what Xi Jinping's China wants. Xi's overriding ambition is to restore China to the predominance in Asia it enjoyed before Western intrusion. At the core of this vision is the Chinese word for China, zhong guo, meaning "Middle Kingdom," reflecting a civilizational creed that sees China as the center of the world. Since taking power in 2012, Xi has concentrated authority so thoroughly that he became known as the "Chairman of Everything," purging rivals through an anticorruption campaign and positioning himself to remain in power beyond traditional term limits. Xi pursues four simultaneous agendas: revitalizing the Communist Party, reviving Chinese nationalism, engineering economic reform, and rebuilding the military with anti-access capabilities that have pushed the US Navy's operational frontier away from China's coast.

Allison argues that fundamental differences between American and Chinese civilizations compound the rivalry. Americans prize freedom and see government as a necessary evil; Chinese prize order and see strong central government as the principal agent of the public good. Chinese strategy favors patience and the gradual accumulation of advantage, more like the board game weiqi (known in the West as go) than chess. Chinese leaders see the US military presence in the western Pacific as an anomaly that will recede as China's power grows, while American leaders insist on maintaining the rules-based order they established after World War II.

Allison sketches five plausible scenarios by which the two countries could stumble into war. An accidental collision at sea near a Chinese-constructed island could escalate to Air-Sea Battle operations, a US warfighting concept for coordinated air and naval strikes on an adversary's mainland. A Taiwan independence crisis could lead to a naval blockade and the accidental sinking of a US warship. A third-party provocation over the Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands) could draw in Japan. A North Korean collapse could see Chinese and US-South Korean forces racing to secure nuclear weapons sites. A trade conflict could escalate through cyberattacks on the US financial system to kinetic military strikes. In each scenario, structural stress transforms manageable incidents into potential catalysts for large-scale conflict.

In the book's final section, Allison presents 12 "clues for peace" drawn from four cases in which rising and ruling powers avoided conflict. The late-fifteenth-century rivalry between Spain and Portugal was defused by papal arbitration and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Post-Cold War Germany rose to economic predominance in Europe without military conflict because it was embedded in institutions such as the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Britain accommodated the rising United States in the early twentieth century through strategic concessions, driven by the realism that war with America was unwinnable. The United States and Soviet Union avoided direct military engagement during the Cold War, constrained by mutual assured destruction (MAD).

Allison warns that America's current strategy of "engage but hedge," which allows diplomats to welcome China into international institutions while the Pentagon plans for conflict, is fundamentally contradictory. He proposes four alternatives ranging from accommodation to redefining the relationship around shared threats such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and climate change. Allison concludes that Thucydides believed men, not gods, were the chief actors in human affairs, and that different choices produce different results. The enduring lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which the book treats as a model of how leadership can avert catastrophic war, is President John F. Kennedy's counsel that nuclear powers must avoid forcing an adversary to choose between humiliation and war. Whether American and Chinese leaders will prove wise enough to escape Thucydides's Trap remains uncertain, but Allison insists that destiny lies "not in our stars, but in ourselves" (240).