The Thucydides Trap Is a Bad Excuse for Giving Ground to Beijing

There is a particular kind of foreign policy argument that sounds brave and works as a surrender. It goes: war with China is a law of history, so the sensible thing is to make concessions now and hope the law has an exception. Notice the move. First the speaker tells you the outcome is fated, then he tells you the only way out is to give up something you were going to defend. Fate, it turns out, comes with a bill, and you are the one paying it.

The idea has a name, the Thucydides Trap, and it deserves a proper hearing before it gets a proper burial. So let me define it, state it at its strongest, and then answer it with the text it claims for its authority.

The thesis at its strongest

The term was popularized by the Harvard scholar Graham Allison. The claim is built on a sentence from the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which began in 431 BC. In his first book, Thucydides says that the rise of Athenian power and the fear it inspired in Sparta made the war inevitable. Allison took that sentence and turned it into a pattern. By his count, in sixteen cases over five hundred years in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one, twelve ended in war and four did not.

Here is the argument as its best defenders would give it, in numbered form.

1. A ruling power fears losing its place, and a rising power resents the limits set on it.
2. That structure makes each side read the other's defensive moves as offensive ones.
3. Third parties, such as allies and client states, can then drag the great powers into a fight neither planned.
4. Five centuries of cases, by Allison's count, show the pattern more often than not ends in war.
5. China is rising and America is the ruling power, so the pattern applies, and prudence requires accommodation: stepping back from commitments, scaling down alliances, and meeting Beijing's claims part of the way.

That is a serious argument, made by serious people, and it is not stupid to worry about miscalculation between nuclear powers. I want to concede the first point freely: fear and misperception are real causes of war, and statesmen who ignore them are reckless. Where the argument goes wrong is in steps four and five, and it goes wrong in ways that anyone can check against the record.

Answer one: Thucydides himself did not say it was fate

Start with the author. Thucydides did write that the growth of Athenian power and the alarm it caused in Sparta made the war inevitable. But read the pages that follow. He does not write a story of impersonal forces. He writes a story of decisions, and he names the people and assemblies who made them.

There is the quarrel at Epidamnus and Corcyra, where Athens chose to ally with Corcyra. There is Potidaea, where Athens pressed a city that Corinth cared about. There is the Megarian decree, an Athenian trade restriction that Sparta's allies treated as an act of economic war. There is the debate in the Spartan assembly in which some of the allies, Corinth above all, pressed for war and Sparta's king Archidamus urged delay. And there is Pericles in Athens, who argued that Athens could win a long war by relying on its fleet and its walls and refusing a land battle.

Every one of those moments was a choice. Archidamus argued that Sparta was not ready and that Athens could not easily be beaten. The Spartans voted for war anyway. Thucydides' point is that fear drove decisions, and the decisions drove the war. Calling a vote "fate" is a way of excusing the people who cast it.

There is a second thing in the text worth noticing. The two sides in that war were a land power and a sea power, a closed and an open society, each with its own alliance. Thucydides spent his pages on the character of each regime, how it deliberated, what it valued and what it feared. His book is a treatise on regimes, not a physics of power. The part of the Trap that gets quoted is arithmetic. The part Thucydides wrote is politics.

Answer two: the case that goes the other way

If the pattern were a law, the exceptions would be rare accidents. They are not. The most important one is the one nearest to us.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a rising United States overtook Britain in industrial output and began building a modern navy. Britain was the ruling power, with the largest empire and the largest fleet. A war between them was not unthinkable. In 1895 and 1896, a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana brought the two close to a confrontation. The United States, under President Cleveland and Secretary of State Richard Olney, insisted on its right to weigh in under the Monroe Doctrine. Britain eventually agreed to arbitration, and an arbitral tribunal settled the boundary in 1899.

Then Britain did something that a declining power doesn't do lightly. It chose to accommodate the Americans in the Western Hemisphere. It signed the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty in 1901, which gave the United States the right to build and manage a canal across Central America. And in the years that followed it concentrated its battleships in home waters, with the growing German navy in mind. The two English-speaking powers drifted toward cooperation, and by 1917 they were fighting on the same side.

What made that transition peaceful? Three things, none of them arithmetic. Both nations spoke the same language of law and custom. Both were governed by representative institutions where the public had to be persuaded. And both saw a larger rival, Imperial Germany, as the real threat. Shared political principles did the work that the Trap says power cannot do.

The Trap's defenders have an answer: Germany and Britain also had a rising and a ruling power, and that one ended in 1914. True, and it proves the point against them. The difference between the British-American case and the British-German case was not a difference in relative power. It was a difference in regimes and intentions. One rising power wanted to share a system with the ruling one. The other wanted to rewrite it.

Answer three: the long peace of the Cold War

The second great exception is the one conservatives should know best. After 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union stood as the two surviving great powers, one rising by conquest across Eastern Europe and the other holding the post-war order together. If the Trap were a law, it would have produced a world war around 1950 or 1962.

It did not. For more than four decades, the two sides never fought each other directly. They fought proxies, they spied, they coerced and they tested each other in Berlin, Korea, Cuba and elsewhere. But they never went to war. The reason is not luck. It is what the strategists called deterrence, and conservatives of the period built it deliberately. America joined NATO in 1949, rebuilt the armed forces after the policy review known as NSC-68 laid out the price of staying free, and kept enough nuclear and conventional strength that a Soviet attack on the West would be a catastrophe for Moscow. The story of that document is told in NSC-68 and the 1950 Memo That Told America the Price of Staying Free, and the logic of keeping the peace by making war unprofitable is the subject of Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price.

Look at what the Trap's advice would have meant in that period. It would have counseled concessions to avoid a clash: leave Berlin, tolerate Soviet expansion, scale down the alliance. The record says the opposite happened and the peace held anyway. America stayed in Berlin, kept its alliance together and out-built the Soviets. And at the end, in 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved without a shot fired between the main rivals. That is the most striking exception of all, and it came from a policy that rejected the Trap, not one that accepted it. The same conclusion follows from Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud, which shows how a conservative president described the ending before it came.

Answer four: ideology, not arithmetic

The Trap treats nations as billiard balls: a rising one and a ruling one collide with predictable force. That leaves out the part of the story that matters most, which is what each government wants and why.

Look at what the Chinese Communist Party is. It is a single-party state founded in 1921, which took power in 1949, and which has never allowed a free election. It is not an ordinary rising power that wishes to be admitted to the club. It is a party with an ideology, a monopoly on power, and a strong interest in showing that its model beats ours. Its leaders say so in their own documents and speeches, and a careful observer should take them at their word.

That matters because the factors that drive conflict are not mainly material. A government that depends for its legitimacy on a story of national humiliation, and on a promise to reclaim territory, behaves differently from one that depends on the consent of the governed. When a regime ties its survival to a map, the map becomes a fixed demand, and a fixed demand does not respond to concessions the way an ordinary bargaining position does. Consider the South China Sea. The case examined in An International Tribunal Ruled Against China in 2016 and Beijing Shrugged shows a government that read a clear international ruling against it and kept building. A nation willing to ignore a verdict is not asking for a seat at the table. It is asking for the table.

This is also where the Trap's advice fails on its own terms. It says concede in order to avoid a larger war. But a regime that treats concessions as proof of weakness will pocket one and ask for the next. The record of such regimes is consistent. Appeasement of Germany in 1938 did not reduce German demands. It raised them. And that is the true parallel to the 1930s, which the Trap's defenders prefer to skip, since it makes their prescription look like Munich.

Answer five: what accommodation costs

Suppose we followed the advice. What would accommodation actually look like?

Start with Taiwan, an island democracy whose security rests on an American statute and a policy of deliberate ambiguity. A retreat there would not be a small adjustment. It would tell every ally in Asia that an American commitment is a promise good only until the other side makes a frightening speech. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia would each draw conclusions about whether to rely on Washington or arm themselves. You can read the legal footing in The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 Is Not a Treaty, So What Does It Promise. The point is that an alliance is a bet that another party will believe you. Once you pull it back, the bet is lost for everyone, not just the party you retreated from.

Then there is the question of technology. The AI race, the semiconductor supply chain and the control of advanced equipment are all fields in which concessions are measured in years of lead. Giving ground here would not stabilize anything. It would hand the leader of a competing system the tools to run it better. The record of Cold War export controls, covered in CoCom Kept Western Technology from Moscow for Forty Years, a Model for China, shows that holding back advanced technology from a rival cost less than the alternative and bought time.

And then the Navy. When two American carrier groups were sent toward Taiwan in 1996, the message was that America would answer coercion, an episode told in When Clinton Sent Two Carrier Groups to the Taiwan Strait in 1996. Nobody pretends the cost was zero. But the price of firmness was one demonstration, and the price of weakness would be a pattern.

The Founding angle

George Washington's Farewell Address warned against permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. But in his annual message to Congress of December 1793 he stated the thing the Trap's advocates forget, that a nation must be ready: "If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it." He did not say that avoiding war means yielding. He said that it means being strong enough that nobody wants to test you. The Farewell Address itself is often misread, as What Washington's Farewell Address Really Said About Foreign Entanglements explains.

The Founders did not believe in fate. They believed in institutions, deliberate choices and the limits of power, and they designed a constitution to keep powerful men from treating their own will as destiny. Those same habits of mind apply to foreign affairs. When a pundit announces that history has already written the ending, a citizen should ask who benefits from the telling.

A fair concession

The reasonable core of the Trap deserves respect. Miscalculation is real. Two nuclear powers who read each other's defensive moves as offensive could stumble into a crisis neither wanted. The answer to that is not retreat. It is clarity, communication and strength: open channels between militaries, clear statements of what we will defend and what we will not, and enough capability that nobody mistakes our resolve for bluff. Those are the tools that worked in the Cold War. They cost money, patience and attention. They do not cost a surrender, and a policy of strength is not a policy of recklessness.

The case in brief

1. The Thucydides Trap is not a law. In the text it comes from, war follows from decisions and not from fate, and Thucydides names the people who made them.
2. The strongest exception is the British-American transition around 1900, which stayed peaceful because of shared institutions and a common view of the real threat.
3. The Cold War ended without a direct clash between the great powers because America built the alliances and the strength that deterred one.
4. Beijing's behavior is driven by what its ruling party wants and needs, which is why concessions invite further demands, as appeasement did in 1938.
5. Accommodation would cost us allies, technology and credibility, while a policy of deterrence has a record of working.

What you can do: read the first book of Thucydides for yourself, then find your members of Congress at your representatives and ask where they stand on funding the alliances and the fleet that keep the peace.