Month: September 2020

Much has been said and written about Thucydides’ Trap of late, ever since Graham Allison thoughtfully addressed it in his 2015 Atlantic article “Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” and in his follow-up best-selling book in 2018 concerning that same question, Destined For War. The premise is that China has overtaken the United States and is in the process of edging it out, economically, politically, and militarily. There is a parallel between China and America’s dynamic now, with Pericles’ Athens and Archidamus’ Sparta in the 440s BC (where the former began to outgrow and out-power the latter), as well as with Germany outpacing England at the turn of the 20th Century, and in fourteen other major historical cases, the vast majority of which resulted in war. Whenever there has been discombobulation as a result of a rising power displacing a ruling power, fear results, and when a capable military power is fearful and unwilling to bend a knee to the new, war becomes inevitable.