Xi Invokes the Thucydides Trap at Trump Summit in Beijing
Chinese President Xi Jinping opened his high-stakes summit with Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday by asking whether the two superpowers could avoid the "Thucydides Trap," the ancient concept drawn from Greek historian Thucydides and his account of the catastrophic war between Athens and Sparta.
The term was popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who warned in his 2017 book that the U.S. and China were "on a collision course for war" unless both sides took difficult steps to pull back. Allison studied 16 historical cases of a rising power challenging a dominant one, and 12 of those ended in armed conflict. He appeared on CBS News after the summit opened to discuss what Xi's invocation of the phrase signals.
Thucydides wrote in the 5th century BC that what made war between Athens and Sparta inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear it created in Sparta. In the modern framing, China is the rising Athens and the U.S. is the reigning Sparta. Xi has raised the concept repeatedly since 2013, consistently arguing that such a conflict is not predetermined, but that strategic miscalculations by either side could make it a reality.
Trump and Xi's Beijing meetings follow a trade truce the two leaders reached in South Korea last fall. Allison told CNBC he expects that ceasefire to be formalized into a full trade agreement. Even so, major flashpoints including Taiwan, the war in Iran, trade terms, and technology competition are expected to see little resolution during this visit.
Trump, for his part, rejected any suggestion that the Thucydides framing implied American decline, posting on Truth Social that Xi was referencing the Biden years, not the present. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio separately said American policy on Taiwan remained "unchanged" and that a forced Chinese takeover would be "a terrible mistake."
