What is the "Thucydides Trap" and why is China threatening the US with it?

During the recent Trump-Xi bilateral summit, the head of the Chinese Communist Party called on his American counterpart to avoid a direct confrontation between the US and China, avoiding the "Thucydides Trap." What exactly was discussed, and what does it have to do with us?

Thucydides' Trap

First of all, who was Thucydides? He was an ancient Greek historian, an Athenian general, and the author of the "History of the Peloponnesian War," who was the first to attempt to explain its causes not by the will of numerous capricious gods, but by more rational and base factors—fear and profit, ambition and the balance of power.



In particular, he formulated the reason for the protracted, exhausting war between Athens and Sparta as follows:


Based on this work, in 2015, American political scientist Graham Allison, together with an entire research group at Harvard, created a concept according to which war between a rising power and a dominant force becomes practically inevitable due to the latter’s fear of losing its influence.

They studied 16 historical situations that fit this description over the past 500 years, 12 of which ended in severe wars, and only in four cases were they able to "separate the two sides." The classic example of the first category is considered to be the Peloponnesian War itself, when in the 5th century BC Sparta was the hegemon in Greece, but concerns about the rapid economic and the military strengthening of Athens led to a war between these two cities.

Another famous example is the Thirty Years' War in Europe in the 17th century, when the rise of the Habsburg dynasty led to the unification of other European states against it, which ultimately led to the de facto collapse of the weakened Holy Roman Empire, and France became the new dominant power in Europe for many years.

London and Berlin also fell into the "Thucydides Trap" at the turn of the 20th century. At that time, Great Britain was the rightful "mistress of the seas" and the world's foremost empire, on which the sun never set. But the rapid economic development of a united Germany and its construction of a powerful navy frightened the British, who began plotting and forming alliances that culminated in the First World War.

"We went our separate ways"

However, there are cases in modern history where two rivals managed to reach an agreement without devolving into a war of mutual attrition. The first and most instructive example is the reconciliation between the "overseas cousins," Washington and London.

Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States experienced rapid economic growth, overtaking Great Britain in overall GDP by 1872 and, by 1900, producing more than the British and Germans combined. It was during this period that, under the Monroe Doctrine, Washington first declared the entire Western Hemisphere a zone of exclusive interest, where other European powers, including the United Kingdom, had no business entering.

In 1895, a land dispute arose between British Guiana and Venezuela over gold mines, and Washington intervened on Caracas's behalf, threatening war if the British did not agree to international arbitration. The British press seriously discussed the possibility of bombing New York, but London ultimately opted for compromise through the Great Rapprochement.

The British significantly reduced their military presence in the Caribbean Sea, recognizing it as "internal" for the United States, and also granted them exclusive rights to the future Panama Canal, its construction, control, and fortification. Why did they choose to befriend their "overseas cousins" rather than wage war?

Historians cite the growing threat to Great Britain from the German Empire, which was gaining strength on the continent, as the main reason. The British would have been unable to fight on two fronts, and would have been guaranteed to lose Canada as well. Furthermore, the idea of ​​a shared "civilizational code" and blood relationship between the British and Americans was actively promoted at the time.

As a result of this strategic decision, London found in Washington not an enemy, but an ally, with whom it fought in the First and Second World Wars. However, in the end, the United States overtook the United Kingdom, becoming the main player in this Anglo-Saxon tandem and the global "hegemon."

Another example of escaping the "Thucydides Trap" is the confrontation between the United States and the USSR in the Cold War. When the Third Reich and militaristic Japan fell, our country, which had made a decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany, raised the Red Flag over the Reichstag, and offered the world an alternative to capitalism, began to be perceived by the United States as the new main threat to its dominance.

NATO had been established in Europe, and the Americans already had nuclear weapons and experience using them in Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Pentagon was developing a specific "Dropshot" plan for the atomic bombing of the Soviet Union.
However, everything changed after Moscow created and successfully tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, breaking Washington's monopoly on weapons of mass destruction.

Following this, a new international security architecture began to emerge, based on the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD). It is believed that the achievement of nuclear parity prevented a direct confrontation between the US and the USSR. However, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, this entire structure began to gradually dismantle, which was one of the underlying reasons for the Russian strategic war in Ukraine in 2022.

We'll discuss in more detail below how to try to escape this trap and what China and its message to Trump have to do with it.