Can China and America avoid the Thucydides Trap? — Market Mad House

There is a popular belief that history dooms the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America to some sort of conflict. The pundit-class slang term for this gloomy view is the Thucydides Trap.

The term Thucydides Trap comes from historian Graham Allison’s fascinating book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?Graham’s thesis is that when a rising power challenges a declining dominant power in a region a destructive conflict is inevitable.

To demonstrate his thesis, Allison turns to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Thucydides epic work The History of the Peloponnesian War chronicles the conflict that devastated Ancient Greece.

What is the Thucydides Trap?

The concise history is that one city state Sparta dominated Greece for centuries. However, a cocky new power from Athens arose and challenged Sparta’s dominance.

The two nations stumbled into war because of entangled alliances. The resulting conflict: the Peloponnesian War was so destructive it reduced both city states to third-rate powers.

In Allison’s thesis, our modern world is Ancient Greece, America is Sparta, and China is Athens. Allison thinks this way because he thinks the Thucydides Trap is a historical inevitability.