At the high-stakes summit with President Donald Trump last month in Beijing, President Xi Jinping reached for an esoteric phrase to frame the state of China-U.S. relations – the “Thucydides Trap.”

“Can China and the U.S. transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?” Xi asked in his opening remarks. 

The academic concept was pioneered by Harvard scholar Graham Allison, who popularized the phrase in a series of articles beginning in 2012 and a companion book released in 2017. 

Drawing on Greek historian Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, Allison theorized that when a rising power challenges an established or declining power, the resulting competition renders war highly probable. 

This dynamic, Allison observed, repeatedly emerged throughout history and in “12 of the 16 cases over the past 500 years,” has trapped rising and declining powers in bloody conflict. 

Academics – and now China’s top leader – have seized on the concept, warning that the intensifying China-U.S. rivalry may be next to follow this familiar script.

However, there are good reasons to cast a critical eye on the growing popularity of the Thucydides Trap and its applicability to contemporary China-U.S. relations. 

Xi’s About-Face 

For years, Beijing wanted nothing to do with the Thucydides Trap. In 2015, Xi told an audience in Seattle that “there is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world.” As late as 2022, a Chinese government spokesman maintained that China “never believed in the so-called Thucydides Trap.”

By 2023, however, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to change its tune. During a meeting with U.S. senators visiting Beijing, Xi acknowledged the Thucydides Trap but stressed that conflict between the two countries was “not inevitable,” according to a Xinhua readout. 

One year later, addressing scholars at Harvard University, Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng stated that “Chinese culture provides many inspirations for navigating around the Thucydides Trap.” 

Xi’s invocation of the Thucydides Trap at the 2026 Beijing summit marks the clearest sign yet that the CCP sees the Trap as a phenomenon to be acknowledged and addressed.   

We can speculate a few reasons why Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have had a change of heart.

First, it reminds Washington and the world that China is, in fact, the rising power. Not that anyone could have easily forgotten: China now boasts the world’s second-largest economy, a massive military that has modernized at breakneck speed, and a vast network of commercial ventures that span the globe. The Thucydides Trap neatly dovetails with Beijing’s proclamation that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” 

However, another reason Xi has likely warmed to the concept is that it is often used as a thinly veiled critique of the United States. The sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, framing often accompanying discussions of the Trap is the notion that the established power bears more responsibility for conflict. Anxious about its declining position, the established power is seemingly preordained to try to contain the rising power, making conflict nearly inevitable. 

Allison generally avoids directly assigning blame in the contemporary Thucydides Trap but often alludes to American culpability. The United States is often framed as a jealous and naïve power that is struggling with “having to cope with a nation that is [America’s] equal.” The U.S. misunderstands China, Washington’s strategy toward China is “fundamentally flawed,” and Allison’s book was designed to “sound an alarm for a Washington that [he fears] is currently sleepwalking towards a war with China.”

Allison’s framing of China, by contrast, is often one of a fast-rising power, expanding organically and causing understandable friction with its neighbors, as the United States once did during its geopolitical ascent. While acknowledging China’s domestic repression and external muscle-flexing, Allison believes Beijing’s intentions are misunderstood:

[W]hat China wants for the foreseeable future is not to seize territory from others. Rather, China wants to be accepted as a great power, to command the respect of other great powers in the councils of the world, and receive the deference great nations have always demanded along their borders. 

Unsurprisingly, the CCP has found success co-opting this narrative for its own purposes, using the imprimatur of a Harvard professor to remind Americans their nation is declining and acting irresponsibly. “One lesson from the Thucydides Trap is that the rise of a country is not the problem; the problem starts when the incumbent nation is afraid of its challenger,” explained an op-ed in China’s nationalist Global Times. 

Power Alone Does Not Explain It

The proclivity to wield Thucydides to blame the established power for conflict is not exclusive to Allison or Xi. After all, one of Thucydides’ most oft-cited passages asserts that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

But what if Sparta had good reason to be fearful? 

The Thucydides Trap is on firmest ground when describing the natural tension likely to manifest between rising and established powers. However, its applicability to contemporary China-U.S. relations, and the framing around established power responsibility, merit cross-examination. 

First, while China’s rise is undeniable, the portrayal of a flailing United States in decline is more questionable. The U.S. share of global GDP in 1996, at the end of the Cold War and the height of the “unipolar moment,” was roughly 25 percent. Today, 30 years later, it stands at 25 percent. If the U.S. is declining, it’s doing so at a glacially slow pace. 

The relative power gap between China and the U.S. has unquestionably shrunk. But the United States remains the sole global superpower with the benchmark international reserve currency, the most desirable destination for capital and human talent, and the world’s most potent and experienced military capable of operating globally.

Second, discussions around the Thucydides Trap often fail to account for the fact that the United States has rational reasons for taking competitive actions against China that have less to do with shifting GDP charts than legitimate concerns about military and economic coercion, territorial aggression, as well as widespread espionage and intellectual property theft.

If the main source of instability in the relationship is the U.S. fear of losing its position, why do plenty of China’s neighbors, and many others further abroad, hold many of the same concerns about China’s actions? 

The CCP’s weaponization of critical resources has strained global supply chains; its predatory market practices have hollowed out foreign industries; its aggression in the South China Sea and militarization of artificial islands have rattled its neighbors and threatened freedom of navigation. 

What does the U.S. fear of losing its position have to do with China’s bullying Australia for requesting a probe into COVID-19’s origins or China’s deadly clashes with Indian soldiers in the Himalayas?

Indeed, India offers a telling contrast. Its population and growth rates now exceed China’s. It ranks fifth globally in defense spending and will soon field the third-largest military in the world. Yet, India has not evoked a fraction of fear and concern abroad that China has. Why? Because the relative balance of power is only one factor in the threat perceptions of nation-states: regime type and regime behavior are often equally or more consequential.

Conclusion

These nuances are often glossed over in discussions around the Thucydides Trap. U.S. competitive actions toward China were formulated in response to longstanding concerns over Beijing’s disruptive conduct. Measures like tariffs, sanctions, and export controls are not mere attempts to suppress a rising competitor; they are adopted in response to predatory and coercive actions taken by the CCP. 

Nor are they employed exclusively against China. The United States uses the same tools of statecraft against other nations deemed adversarial, from Iran and Russia to North Korea and Cuba. 

The Thucydides Trap is vulnerable to being warped to portray China as the victim. It reductively characterizes rising powers as reactive and strips them of agency. It is therefore no surprise that Beijing is now embracing this construct, hoping to shift the responsibility for stability and avoiding escalation onto Washington. We shouldn’t fall for the trap.