The "Thucydides Trap" Deconstructed — A Western-Centric Narrative Weapon

The Birth of the Concept

The "Thucydides Trap" is not an ancient concept. It is a modern academic product extracted by Harvard scholar Graham Allison in 2012. He lifted one sentence from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War — "It was the rise of Athens and the fear this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable" — packaged it as a theory of international relations, and pushed it to the world with his 2017 book Destined for War.

Allison reviewed 500 years of history, identified 16 cases of "a rising power challenging a ruling power," and claimed 12 of them ended in war. His conclusion was stark and shocking: China is challenging the United States, and the iron law of history dictates that the probability of a hot war between the two countries is extremely high.

Core Logic: A Zero-Sum Fatalism of Great Powers

The underlying architecture of the theory is a textbook case of Western zero-sum thinking:

A rising power grows stronger → the ruling power grows fearful → fear breeds confrontation → confrontation produces war

The hinge is "fear" — not calculation of gains and losses, but psychological drive. Sparta did not go to war because Athens had actually struck it; it went to war because "Athens might strike me" — the fear itself.

This logic compresses great-power relations into a closed system: power is a zero-sum transfer, the total is always 1, and every gain of yours is a loss of mine. The idea of incremental growth — that cooperation can expand the pie — has no place in this frame.

Three Fatal Flaws

Flaw 1: A Western-Centric Misapplication

The 16 cases Allison lists occur overwhelmingly in Europe. The players involved — Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, Germany, Japan — are without exception Western colonial powers. Their rise was invariably accompanied by overseas colonization, military conquest, and resource extraction. Their historical experience: a strong country must dominate.

But to apply this rule to China is to use the survival rules of the wolf pack to predict the behavior of the elephant. Allison himself does not read Chinese; his research team has no engagement with the Chinese civilizational literature. A Western scholar who does not understand the logic of Chinese civilization, drawing only on induction from Western history, issues a logical judgment about a non-Western civilization. This is academic arrogance — and, more pointedly, civilizational bias.

Flaw 2: Selective Historical Statistics

"12 out of 16 ended in war" looks like ironclad proof, but the selection is rigged. The 16 cases are themselves pre-filtered — only those historical cases in which conflict actually broke out were chosen, while cases of great-power transitions that successfully avoided conflict (such as the United States and Britain, or the U.S.–Soviet Cold War, which never turned into direct hot war) were excluded. Statistical bias makes the conclusion look more certain than it actually is.

Flaw 3: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

This is the most dangerous part of the theory — once policymakers become convinced that "China and the United States must fight," they will act according to the logic of preparing for war, and that hostile behavior will inevitably provoke countermeasures, ultimately pushing both sides into conflict.

This is no longer prediction; it is a curse. An academic theory about war is becoming the catalyst of war by shaping the cognition of policymakers.

The Trap's Inversion Mechanism — Lishi Ge's Complementary Perspective

Taiwan-based commentator Lishi Ge Liyixiu offers a key inversion logic: the Thucydides Trap is premised on the assumption of being "strong enough."

The Thucydides Trap logic is: you are strong enough that I can take you down, so I have to take you out before you replace me. But if you are now strong enough — strong enough that I may not be able to take you out — then the Thucydides Trap logic flips.

When China becomes so strong that the United States cannot overwhelm it by military means, the chain of "rising power challenges ruling power → war" breaks at its very first link. Trump, through his firsthand experience at the Beijing Summit, has already drawn the conclusion that both China and the United States are "the most powerful" — so one-sided suppression is not possible.

This inversion logic echoes China's long-standing narrative of "the Pacific is vast enough to accommodate both China and the United States" — but when a Taiwanese commentator says it, it confirms the cross-spectrum penetration of the logic.

Two Upgrades of the Concept

Version 2.0: Sanctions Are War

The modern version of the Thucydides Trap has stretched from the military to the financial domain. Cutting a country off from SWIFT, freezing its foreign reserves, confiscating its overseas assets — these acts are no longer "auxiliaries of diplomatic means" but direct acts of war. A U.S. Treasury Secretary once openly admitted: "Through statecraft, we have collapsed Iran's economy and achieved our goal without firing a shot."

This is a form of the "trap" that can destroy a country's economic system without firing a shot. It is more covert, more controllable, and more brutal than the classical Thucydides Trap.

Version 3.0: Active Reception of the Narrative Weapon

At the May 2026 Beijing Summit, Xi Jinping proactively raised three questions in his opening remarks:

"Can China and the United States step over the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of great-power relations? Can we work together to address global challenges and inject more stability into the world? Can we look to the well-being of our two peoples and the future of humanity, and together open a brighter future for our bilateral relationship?"

This is an important rhetorical upgrade. The Thucydides Trap was originally an argument in the hands of Western scholars ("China and the U.S. must fight"); by proactively putting it on the summit's core agenda, Beijing turned "can it be stepped over" into a question that actually needs answering. This is both an active reception of the Western discourse framework and a preemptive framing — preventing the U.S. side from defining this summit through the framework of "competition" or "conflict."

China's "Level-Eye" Response

China's response runs along two lines:

Narrative line: China will not take the old road of "a strong country must dominate." As Wang Yi has said, all things grow together without harming each other; China and the United States should "be different yet harmonious," partners rather than adversaries. "The old logic that a strong country must dominate simply does not apply to China."

Capability line: in the end it is a logic of capability. When China's strength is enough to make the United States abandon the illusion of solving problems through war, the trap collapses of its own accord. The savanna is large enough to hold both the lion and the elephant — but only on the condition that the elephant be big enough.

The Turning Significance of the 2026 Beijing Summit

The May 2026 China–U.S. summit may be remembered by history as a watershed. The two sides ultimately stepped around the Thucydides Trap — the academic curse — and completed a strategic encounter by "passing each other by." This does not mean that competition has disappeared — only that the discourse has shifted from the fatalist narrative of "war must come" to a new framework of "managed competition, moving in the same direction, and mutual accomplishment."

"These are questions of history, of the world, and of the people — they are also the questions of our era that leaders of major countries must write together."
— Xi Jinping's three questions at the Beijing Summit