by Alan Greeley Misenheimer

National War College

National Defense University

CASE STUDY

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

The United States, China, and the Prospect of 

“Inevitable” War
National War College

National Defense University

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Cover

Statue of Greek historian and author Thucydides in front of Austrian 

parliament building, April 29, 2010, in Vienna, Austria (Courtesy Chris JL)
Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

National War College

Case Study

National Defense University Press

Washington, D.C.

June 2019

by Alan Greeley Misenheimer

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

The United States, China, and the

Prospect of “Inevitable” War

Thucydides, historian of the ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta, counsels the 

modern strategist, not on the “inevitability” of conflict between great powers today, but on 

elements of leadership and political dynamic that can bear positively or negatively on the 

national command decisions that lead to war (or not) and shape its outcome.

That war is an evil is a proposition so familiar to everyone that it would be 

tedious to develop it. No one is forced to engage in it by ignorance, or kept out of it by 

fear, if he fancies there is anything to be gained by it.

—Hermocrates of Syracuse

[Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 4.59.2]

Unlike other emergent countries, China wants to be China and accepted as 

such, not as an honorary member of the West. The Chinese will want to share this 

century as co-equals with the United States.

—Lee Kuan Yew, September 2011

Socrates: Then a slice of our neighbors’ land will be wanted by us for pasture 

and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit 

of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?

Glaucon: Most certainly.

Socrates: And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?

Glaucon: That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

—Plato, The Republic, Book II
Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those 

of the author and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the Defense Department or 

any other agency of the Federal Government. Cleared for public release; distribution unlimited.

Portions of this work may be quoted or reprinted without permission, provided that a 

standard source credit line is included. NDU Press would appreciate a courtesy copy of reprints 

or reviews.

Clayton Sharb, a 2016 intern at the Institute for the Study of War, contributed to the 

research for this case study.

First printing, June 2019
Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................ 1

From the Aegean to the South (and East) China Sea .................................... 4

Reactions to the Thucydides Trap .................................................................... 7

Power Transition Theory before the Thucydides Trap .................................. 9

What Does Thucydides Actually Say about the Origins of the War?.........10

In Search of Causality and Necessity: Aitiai and Prophasis ........................15

Fear, Honor, and Interest, and Thucydides’ other “Traps” ..........................18

Trap 1: National Character..............................................................................19

Trap 2: Governing System ...............................................................................20

Trap 3: Domestic Tranquility..........................................................................21

Trap 4: Economic Power..................................................................................22

Trap 5: Leaders..................................................................................................23

Trap 6: Allies and Alliances.............................................................................26

Trap 7: The Role of Tykē (Chance) in Peace and War.................................28

Assessing the “Allison Trap”............................................................................28

Conclusions: Destined for Difficult Diplomacy, Not for War ....................34
Geography, History, Destiny...........................................................................37

Appendix ...........................................................................................................41

Notes ..................................................................................................................43

About the Author .............................................................................................62
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

Introduction

The notion of a “Thucydides Trap” that will ensnare China and the United States in a 21stcentury conflict—much as the rising power of Athens alarmed Sparta and made war “inevitable” between the Aegean superpowers of the 5th century BCE—has received global attention 

since entering the international relations lexicon 6 years ago. Scholars, journalists, bloggers, and 

politicians in many countries, notably China, have embraced this beguiling metaphor, coined 

by Harvard political science professor Graham Allison, as a framework for examining the likelihood of a Sino-American war. As Allison summarizes the concept,

When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should 

sound, extreme danger ahead. This is a big insight earned for us by Thucydides. 

And Thucydides said, famously, it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this 

instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable. This was the war between Athens 

and Sparta that basically destroyed classical Greece.1

Allison’s active promotion has given Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 399 BCE), historian of the 

Peloponnesian War, new cachet as a sage of U.S.-China relations. References in academic journals, politicians’ speeches, and political cartoons have become ubiquitous across the Indo-Pacific region. Allison examines this historical metaphor at length in his May 2017 book Destined 

for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

This case study examines the Thucydides Trap metaphor and the response it has elicited. 

Hewing closely to what the historian of the Peloponnesian War actually says about the causes 

and inevitability of war, it argues that, while Thucydides’ text does not support Allison’s normative assertion about the “inevitable” result of an encounter between “rising” and “ruling” powers, 

the History of the Peloponnesian War (hereafter, History) does identify elements of leadership 

and political dynamic that bear directly on whether a clash of interests between two states is 

resolved through peaceful means or escalates to war. It is precisely because war typically begins 

with a considered decision by a national command authority to reject other options and mobilize for conflict (and thus always entails an element of choice) that insight from Thucydides’ 

History remains relevant and beneficial for the contemporary strategist, or citizen, concerned 

in such decisions.2

Accordingly, this case study concludes that the Thucydides Trap, as conceived and presented by Graham Allison, draws welcome attention both to Thucydides and to the pitfalls 

of great power competition, but fails as a heuristic device or predictive tool in the analysis of 
2 

Misenheimer

contemporary events. Allison’s metaphor offers, at best, a potentially misleading over-simplification of Thucydides’ nuanced and problematic account of the origins of the epochal 

conflict that defined his age. Moreover, it overlooks actual insights from the History that can 

help political decisionmakers—including, but not limited to, those of the United States and 

China—either avoid war or, if ignored, pose genuine policy “traps” that can make an avoidable war more likely, and a necessary war more costly.

An old adage defines war as God’s way of teaching us geography, and experience shows 

that anxiety over potential war can be equally instructive.3

 The 1954 Taiwan Strait Crisis taught 

American voters the location and strategic significance of the previously little-known island 

groups of Quemoy and Matsu, a geography lesson that helped persuade them to elect Dwight 

Eisenhower to a second term. Lingering tensions after the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis made the islands a hot topic in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. Kennedy’s confident articulation of a nuanced position—supporting nationalist China but refusing to commit U.S. forces to protect tiny 

islands within range of mainland China’s artillery—helped tip the election against Nixon, whose 

pledge to protect Quemoy and Matsu as a matter of principle was widely judged too bellicose.4

The 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis again drew global attention to China’s regional relations and 

territorial claims. In dispatching a U.S. carrier battle group to the region, U.S. Defense Secretary 

William J. Perry issued a tough public declaration: “Beijing should know . . . that while they are 

a great military power, the premier—the strongest—military power in the Western Pacific is 

the United States.”5

 Arduous diplomacy defused the crisis and U.S.-Chinese relations in time 

resumed a positive footing. In fact, as the likelihood of conflict receded, the massive growth of 

two-way exchange transformed the U.S.-China bilateral relationship in ways that neither Eisenhower, nor Kennedy or Nixon could have foreseen. 

Bilateral trade in goods burgeoned from $63.5 billion in 1996 to a staggering $599 billion 

in 2015. As a result, export-led growth transformed China’s domestic economy as the country’s 

middle class grew from 4 percent of the population in 2004 to 54 percent in 2012.6

 With a 15.9 

percent share of America’s global trade, China surpassed Canada to become the largest U.S. 

trading partner for the first time in 2016 (which also marked the 5th consecutive year in which 

the U.S. trade deficit with China topped $300 billion).7

 Over the same 20-year period, China 

pursued a military buildup and a regional security policy that can be understood in large measure as a sustained effort to alter the power calculus behind Perry’s tough message in 1996. 

In recent years, Beijing’s assertive actions in support of its enormous maritime claims in 

the South China and East China seas have confronted Washington with urgent new geography 

lessons. From remote survey stations in the Spratly/Nansha group in the mid-1990s, China 
3

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

has gradually expanded the scale and permanence of its offshore presence. In December 2013, 

China began extensive dredging and land reclamation efforts in support of its claims to three 

island groups in the South China Sea—the Spratly Islands, the Paracel/Xisha Islands, and the 

submerged Zhongsha Islands, which for China includes both the Macclesfield Bank and the 

Scarborough Shoal—and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Regional states, 

most allied with the United States, have protested China’s mounting pressure tactics—including 

direct naval action—to assert control and restrict international access to disputed small features 

like Mischief Reef.8

 Years of diplomatic engagement with Beijing by its maritime neighbors, including Brunei, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam, have not 

slowed the Chinese drive to solidify its influence over the entire region. 

The July 2016 international tribunal ruling against China’s maritime claims in the South 

China Sea and the subsequent policy lurch toward China and away from the United States by 

mercurial Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte have generated new uncertainties. The fact that 

two disputed territories, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (Japan) and the Scarborough Shoal (Philippines), are covered by U.S. bilateral defense treaties adds sensitive red lines to the regional 

map. Despite the enormous volume of U.S.-China bilateral trade and investment, the palpable 

expansion of Chinese economic and military power in the South China and the East China seas 

thus raises inescapable concerns about the potential for escalation and conflict. 

President Donald Trump’s extended visit to the Indo-Pacific region—including stops in 

China, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines (for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of 

the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN]), and Vietnam (for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation [APEC] economic leaders meeting and CEO Summit)—brought renewed 

international attention to the Thucydides Trap metaphor at the end of 2017, even as regional 

concerns over island-building appeared to recede. 

During a year in which escalating tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program and missile tests dominated the news, China managed to dampen the furor over its island-building 

program, which now includes 7 outposts in the Spratlys and 20 in the Paracels, by projecting an 

image of goodwill toward its smaller maritime neighbors. Growing regional travel by Chinese 

tourists and investments under the rubric of the $900 billion “One Belt, One Road” initiative 

proved an effective palliative after escalating tensions through the preceding 3 years. While 

Chinese investment in far-flung port infrastructure construction and management is gradually altering the daily environment for sea-going traffic across a vast expanse of the Indian and 

Pacific Oceans, Beijing also ended 6 years of stalling talks toward a long-sought ASEAN code 
4 

Misenheimer

of conduct designed to avoid clashes at sea. The negotiations, which will not address conflicting 

claims of maritime sovereignty, are set to resume in early 2018. 

While China has repeatedly claimed that its dredging and reclamation projects ended in 

June 2015, reporting by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative indicates that the Chinese 

continue to reclaim land in the Paracels, including recent work at Tree Island and North Island.9

Some perceived that the interaction of U.S. and Chinese naval assets in the disputed regions 

had “settled into a comfortable groove,” but the continuing Chinese buildup of capabilities on 

its new island outposts—including repair of damage inflicted by Typhoon Sarika in October 

2016 at multiple sites and the arrival of fighter jets on Woody Island, the primary Chinese base 

in the Paracels—perpetuated uncertainty over Chinese intentions and the ominous long-term 

implications of the Thucydides Trap.10

From the Aegean to the South (and East) China Sea

New York Times correspondent David Sanger, in a wide-ranging commentary on Chinese President Hu Jintao’s January 2011 visit to the United States, was the first to use the term 

“Thucydides Trap” in print:

While no official would dare say so publicly as President Hu Jintao bounced from 

the White House to meetings with business leaders to factories in Chicago last 

week, his visit, from both sides’ points of view, was all about managing China’s rise 

and defusing the fears that it triggers. Both Mr. Hu and President Obama seemed 

desperate to avoid what Graham Allison of Harvard University has labeled “the 

Thucydides Trap”—that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that, 

over the years, can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse.11

Sanger cited vivid examples of the way mutual fear and mistrust limited scope for improving 

U.S.-China bilateral relations, including the fact that a special Sino-American partnership, the 

“Group of Two” (G-2)—“a fantasy among some . . . that the world would soon be run by joint action between Beijing and Washington”12—had failed to materialize following the 2007 election 

of Barack Obama. Worse, rising tensions now threatened to spring the Thucydides Trap and 

spark war. A week later the Times hailed the term as a “newly newsworthy” entry in the foreign 

affairs lexicon.13 Princeton political theorist Joseph Nye invoked Thucydides in similar terms a 

few months later in discussing his new book The Future of Power.

14
5

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

The onset of large-scale Chinese dredging and artificial island-building in late 2013 made 

the trap appear all the more credible. In late 2015, U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Scott Swift 

expressed concerns that were widely held across the region: “My concern is that after many 

decades of peace and prosperity, we may be seeing the leading edge of a return of ‘might makes 

it right’ to the region.” In response, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed China’s 

good intentions and blamed rising tension on others: “Certain countries are exaggerating tensions in the South China Sea region, which is in reality to create confusion and meddle in the 

South China Sea. China is resolutely opposed to this.” A Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman 

went further: “At the same time, [they are] wantonly expressing remarks to create tensions, in 

an attempt to sow confusion and muddy the waters.” Comments by regional observers on the 

“Rising Dragon” and the “Wounded Eagle” in the Indo-Pacific region both reflected and seemed 

to validate the Thucydides Trap metaphor.15

On the one hand, China’s expanding global economic heft could potentially be seen as a 

positive manifestation of mutually beneficial trade ties and also as a powerful, perhaps insurmountable, disincentive to war. Indeed, without resorting to the rosy optimism of Norman 

Angell, it seems worth noting that U.S.-China economic interdependence could hardly be more 

dissimilar to the nature of relations between ancient Athens and Sparta.16 The Athenians dominated Aegean commerce and finance, while Sparta’s subsistence economy did not even make 

use of currency. Globalization as a centripetal force drawing mutually dependent states toward 

a common center would be unimaginable to an ancient Greek. Sparta did not depend on commercial supply chains originating in Athens and, as Karl Eikenberry wryly points out, “Athens 

did not hold $1 trillion dollars’ worth of Spartan treasury notes.”17 Economic linkage does not 

preclude conflict, but it is not reasonable to assume, as Allison would have it, that future relations between Washington and Beijing will be shaped by the influence of Fear alone, without 

regard for Honor or—above all—Interest.

On the other hand, the disdain for international law manifest in China’s island-building is 

widely seen as consonant with confrontational realist politics and the Thucydides Trap.18 Recognizing the obvious potential for a U.S.-Chinese naval clash through miscalculation if not by 

design (not unlike the ever-present risk of a similar clash between U.S. and Iranian naval assets 

in the Gulf since the 1979 Iranian Revolution), many experts seemed to accept the soundness of 

the Thucydides Trap concept without pausing to consult Thucydides on the matter. 

Allison has continued to promote and flesh out the Thucydides Trap concept over the past 

6 years. Writing in the Financial Times in August 2012, he offered a troubling conclusion: 
6 

Misenheimer

The defining question about global order in the decades ahead will be: Can China 

and the United States escape Thucydides’s trap? The historian’s metaphor reminds 

us of the dangers two parties face when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as 

Athens did in 5th century BC and Germany did at the end of the 19th century. Most 

such challenges have ended in war. Peaceful cases required huge adjustments in 

the attitudes and actions of the governments and the societies . . . involved.19

Allison notes, furthermore, that peaceful outcomes are uncommon. Based on the Belfer Center’s review of the past five centuries, “If we were betting on the basis of history, the answer to the 

question about Thucydides’s trap appears obvious. In 11 of 15 cases since 1500 where a rising 

power emerged to challenge a ruling power, war occurred.” Writing in the New York Times in 

2013, he linked the challenge directly to the first U.S. visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Can 

Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi successfully defy those odds?”20

Though he offers neither analysis of the decisionmaking mechanism that led to a war decision by either side in those precedent cases, nor a convincing explanation of why the supposedly paradigmatic Belfer list is (a) restricted to the past five centuries and (b) heavily weighted 

toward European conflicts (ignoring, for example, well-chronicled older wars of China, Japan, 

and the Middle East), Allison cites two crucial variables—rise and fear—as the dynamic factors 

that drove Athens and Sparta to war and are all but certain to do the same with Beijing and 

Washington in our time:

Thucydides went to the heart of the matter, focusing on the inexorable, structural 

stress caused by a rapid shift in the balance of power between two rivals. Note that 

Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing 

entitlement, sense of importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the 

one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo 

this engenders in the established power, on the other.21

For Allison, the prospect of an epochal sorpasso, as China’s national power is seen to surpass 

that of the United States, thus poses a grave danger that could assume multiple forms:

Thucydides’ Trap refers to the natural, inevitable, inescapable discombobulation 

that accompanies a tectonic shift in the relative power of a rising and ruling state. 

Under such conditions, unexpected actions by third parties that would otherwise 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

be manageable can provide a spark that leads to results neither major competitor 

would have chosen.22

Accordingly, Allison calls on “leaders in both China and the U.S. [to] begin talking to each other 

much more candidly about likely confrontations and flash points, [and] . . . making substantial 

adjustments to accommodate the irreducible requirements of the other.”23 Absent such a course 

correction, his prognosis is grim: “On the current trajectory, war between the United States and 

China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the 

moment.” In fact, “Judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.”24

In the same Atlantic essay in September 2015, Allison noted the addition of a sixteenth 

precedent case to the Belfer Center database, boosting the ratio of “war” to “no war” outcomes 

from 11/15 to 12/16. He also identified a broad parallel between the great power rivalry in 

Europe that set the stage for World War I and the contemporary China/U.S. dynamic in the 

Indo-Pacific region. Allison places heavy emphasis on the remarkable growth of Chinese wealth 

and influence over recent decades as a threat to American power, asserting that the rise of 

China poses a regional security challenge “of genuinely Thucydidean proportions.”25 While acknowledging that a Sino-American war seems improbable at present, he emphasized that the 

100th anniversary of World War I should remind us of “man’s capacity for folly.”26 Six years of 

sustained promotion of the Thucydides Trap metaphor culminated in the May 2017 publication 

of Destined for War.

Reactions to the Thucydides Trap

As trade patterns and economic statistics, along with island development in the South 

and East China seas, have kept the evolving U.S.-China relationship at the forefront of world 

attention over the past 6 years, Allison’s metaphor has become a fixture in expert commentary 

and analysis around the world. In Washington, government officials, including Chairman of the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, embraced it at once: “I think that one of my jobs as Chairman, and as an adviser to our senior leaders, is to help avoid a Thucydides trap. We don’t want 

the fear of a rising China to make war inevitable, so we are going to avoid Thucydides’ trap.”27

Many American officials have expressed similar sentiments over recent years.

Among dozens of thoughtful commentaries by American observers and analysts, former 

World Bank Chairman Robert Zoellick has set the highest mark to date for intellectual rigor and 

diplomatic finesse. His speeches and articles tacitly suggest a parallel between the Thucydides 

Trap concept and the call by Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2011 for “a new model of great 
8 

Misenheimer

power relations” as the key to positive U.S.-China relations going forward. He introduced the 

phrase during a visit to the United States in 2012, and his successor, Xi Jinping, adopted it as 

his own at the Sunnylands Summit with President Obama in 2013. The Thucydides Trap idea 

focuses on an adjustment in U.S.-China bilateral relations, and the “new model” catchphrase 

provides a framework for discussing what that adjustment might entail. Zoellick suggests possible elements the new model might include, stressing above all the necessity of an overarching 

commitment by both countries to maintaining the broad lines of the international economic 

order defined by the Washington Consensus. Zoellick, who has been writing about China since 

the 1996 crisis, weaves historical perspective and, crucially, an appreciation for the importance 

of understanding China’s own perceptions of the United States and its intentions in light of the 

repeated pendulum swings in bilateral relations over the past century. 

It may not be the case that war foreseen is war forestalled, however. From elite experts in 

world affairs to casual bloggers, over the past 6 years, hundreds have weighed in—prompted 

by Allison—with published views, pro or con, on the proposition that China’s rising power will 

cause “inevitable” war. Ja Ian Chong and Todd H. Hall are prominent among few voices on the 

American side questioning the validity of the Thucydides Trap, deeming invocation of the pre–

World War I German-British power dynamic as “of little use” to understanding U.S.-Chinese 

relations today. Strains of alarmist xenophobia are far more common, often keyed to a negative 

interpretation of the “new model” suggested by Hu and Xi as synonymous with American capitulation and effective withdrawal from the Indo-Pacific region. A 2014 Foreign Affairs article 

by two prominent analysts expressed it starkly: “The ‘new type of major power relations’ slogan 

is a trap for the U.S. and Obama should definitively abandon it when meeting with Xi at APEC 

this year.”28 Dingding Chen explains the continuing dilemma from the U.S. standpoint: Accepting China’s new slogan would send the wrong signal to American allies in Asia and potentially 

weaken the dominant U.S. position in the region, but rejecting it outright would make cooperation with China on a wide range of issues very difficult, if not impossible.29

Commentators in the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, 

and elsewhere have weighed in on the Thucydides Trap, nearly all accepting the relevance of the 

metaphor and expressing varying degrees of hope that the war hazard can be avoided. In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has made repeated references to the Thucydides Trap 

in speeches and other public remarks since taking office in 2015. He has also directed public 

pleas to Xi and to Chinese Premier Li Kequing not to “fall into the Thucydides Trap.”30

Allison’s concept made immediate inroads with China, and some see Hu’s “new model” proposal as a direct response to it. Certainly, one of the early U.S. responses by National Security 
9

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

Advisor Tom Donilon in 2012 was framed with the Thucydides Trap in mind: “[The United States 

is open to exploring] a new model of relations between an existing power and an emerging one.” 

Subsequent remarks by Hu were similar: “We should prove that the traditional belief that big 

powers are bound to enter into conflict is wrong, and [instead] seek new ways of developing relations between major countries in the era of economic globalization.”31 Such sentiments have been 

a staple of public remarks by Xi Jinping since he became president in 2012. Under the headline, 

“Thucydides Trap Not Etched in Stone,” a 2015 article in China Daily carried a range of views on 

the future of China-U.S. relations, including this sophisticated note of caution: 

Although China and the United States are not likely to go to war against each 

other in the near future, by harping on the Thucydides Trap, some commentators 

are trying to hijack the Sino-U.S. ties. As such, Chinese scholars should avoid 

using the term in the context of Sino-U.S. ties. Instead, they should find a concept 

or theory from China’s long history to describe future Sino-U.S. relations while 

laying emphasis on the new type of major-power relationship.32

Power Transition Theory before the Thucydides Trap

While Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap concept demands further scrutiny, there is obvious benefit in directing public attention to the uncertainty that unavoidably attends perceptible 

adjustments in the geopolitical status quo. Indeed, Allison is not the first modern scholar to do 

so. It bears noting that the formulation of “power transition theory” as a field of international 

relations is typically attributed to A.F.K. Organski in the 1950s.33

The field of power transition theory reflects a classic 20th-century approach to political 

science, with an emphasis on social science metrics and statistical evaluators. Some specialists 

(for example, Richard Ned Lebow), however, have tended to downplay its significance. As Alek 

Chance points out, one enduring criticism is the fact that

Power transition theorists tend to find the majority of their examples in conflicts 

within modern European history, an era full of the glorification of militarism 

and an explicitly institutionalized realpolitik. This in turn highlights how many 

of the conflicts that some attribute to shifts in relative power can be explained in 

numerous ways. The Second World War, for example, appears on most lists of 

power transition conflicts, but to envision the competition between Nazi Germany 
10 

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and Great Britain as essentially being a question of differential economic growth 

is to ignore other obviously significant factors.34

More broadly, measuring the shifting balance of power between rival states (a difficult task at 

best, although Organski formulated robust statistical methods for the effort) makes sense only 

in that power transition involves some degree of zero-sum tradeoff. In earlier historical periods, 

this would have entailed claim to the same patch of productive farmland. In modern times, it 

would involve a conceptual trade-off of influence in the international system. Chance also raises 

a logical question about the applicability of power transition theory in this context:

While the United States has certainly exercised considerable influence in creating 

the current world order and derives many benefits from it, it falls short of 

exercising the sort of dominance that is presupposed by power transition theory. 

The contemporary world order is neither zero-sum in its distribution of goods nor 

does the most powerful state unilaterally dictate the rules of the road. Moreover, 

many political scientists have argued that the ability of great powers to impose 

their preferences will only decline further in the future.35

Such objections notwithstanding, the essential vision of power transition theory will sound 

familiar to readers acquainted with Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap:

The dominant nation and the challenger are very likely to wage war on one 

another whenever the challenger overtakes in power the dominant nation. It is 

this shift that destabilizes the system and begins the slide toward war. The speed 

with which the challenger overtakes the dominant nation is also important; 

the faster one country overtakes the other, the greater the risk of war. These are 

necessary but not sufficient conditions, however, for unless the challenger actually 

surpasses the dominant nation, war will not break out. Moreover, the challenger 

may also surpass the dominate nation without fighting it. Wars, therefore, are not 

inevitable.36

What Does Thucydides Actually Say about the Origins of the War?

Thucydides aspired to create an analytical work that would not only provide an accurate 

account of the “world war” that shaped his age, but also become an “everlasting possession,”37
11

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

not because it enchanted with fabulous storytelling, but because of its enduring utility: “If [the 

History] be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an 

aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble 

if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.”38 To the extent that continuing global discussion of 

the Thucydides Trap contributes to fulfillment of that grand ambition, the historian might be 

pleased. Thucydides believed that patterns of behavior—both in individuals and in states—visible to him in the Peloponnesian War had long existed and were ingrained in human nature. 

This explains why, of the many voices raised in response to Allison’s Thucydides Trap concept, 

none has challenged the enlistment of an ancient Greek for vital perspective on the contemporary interaction of two powerful states in vast regions utterly unknown to him. If 5th-century 

Greeks behaved in a way uniquely different from others, and if human societies facing the duress of war did not act in characteristic ways, the History would be relegated to the status of an 

antiquarian curiosity.39

Thucydides promises “conclusions” about the war that have “cost [him] some labor” to research and formulate,40 but he makes his reader work hard to ferret out what they are. Whereas 

Sun Tzu’s Art of War (which may have been composed at the same time as the Peloponnesian 

War) offers the reader a trove of finely crafted nuggets of wisdom to be savored individually 

and applied directly to 1 of 13 specified aspects of warfare,41 Thucydides obliges his reader to 

examine his History and distill lessons from the text in toto. A few simple examples amply demonstrate the hazard of mining Thucydides for “easter eggs” of political insight:

■ A reader of Pericles’ celebrated Funeral Oration might discern in Thucydides an uncritical proponent of pure democracy, imperialistic triumphalism, and unconcealed chauvinism.42

■ A reader of the Melian Dialogue might discern a darkly cynical view of human nature, 

with force acknowledged as the sole means of bringing order to a chaotic universe devoid 

of justice.43

■ A reader of the episode of stasis in Corcyra or the ravages of the plague in Athens might 

perceive a view of human politics as irretrievably fractious and violent, and human beings 

as violent, immoral, manipulative, untrustworthy, and driven solely by ambition.44

But the synthesis of human nature (literally, “the human thing”/κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον),45 as invoked in all these powerful manifestations of human behavior, each polished with great literary 

and rhetorical skill, provides a profound insight into human nature that is both radically different from what any one of the three would suggest on its own and, more importantly, surely 
12 

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closer to the intent of the author. In the final analysis, Thucydides presents human nature as the 

truest rationale (prophasis/πρόφασις) for the Peloponnesian War.46 He depicts, by turns, not 

only humanity’s noblest aspirations and basest depredations as well as a capacity for nobility 

and wisdom, but also an appetite for gratuitous brutality without visible limit. If this accurately 

reflects Thucydides’ view of human nature, he is in accord with Aristotle: “For just as man is 

the best of the animals when completed, when separated from law and adjudication he is the 

worst.”47 For both Aristotle and Thucydides, one extreme is not found to be more, or less, true 

than the other. To be human is to embody both tendencies.

Human beings, impelled by their nature, sometimes decide to go to war, but that decision 

is often made on the basis of faulty information, poor reasoning, or both. The History contains 

more than a dozen accounts of a state’s internal deliberation on whether or not to enter a war—

six in Book 1 alone.48 These accounts also offer a range of arguments about what constitutes 

justice in war.49 War is, moreover, a legal status, not merely a state of ongoing conflict.50

The Athenian debate over whether or not to invade Sicily ranks with the initial Spartan 

debate over whether or not to declare war on Athens as the most consequential of the war. 

Thucydides highlights many such decisions, noting that—as in this case—errors, lies, gaps in 

knowledge, and tendentious hidden agendas by foreign allies and/or domestic politicians frequently undermine rational judgment and lead to disaster.51 Nicias pleads with the Athenians to 

refrain from “grasping at another empire before we have secured the one we have already,”52 but 

decades of near-constant war have brought them wealth and power, and stopping, even pausing, 

now seems unthinkable. Alcibiades voices the popular consensus on this point: “We cannot fix 

the exact point at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must 

not be content with retaining what we have but must scheme to extend it for, if we cease to rule 

others, we shall be in danger of being ruled ourselves.”53 He “inflames and stirs” the Athenians 

to invade Sicily, just as he will later stimulate the Spartans to fortify Decelea and thereby assure 

the eventual defeat of Athens.54

A scholarly case can be (and often is) made that Thucydides is pessimistic or, as Hans Morgenthau and Leo Strauss perceived, the prototypical Realist. But the sophistication of the story 

as told by a historian who subordinates facts to ideas (as Jacqueline de Romilly says)—including through the choice of which incidents to emphasize, deemphasize, or omit altogether—is 

such that a countervailing scholarly case can be (and often is) made in opposition to all such 

assertions.55

Allison’s Thucydides Trap, keyed directly to a single line in isolation, is thus at best the 

first step on a considerably longer path. The student of politics and/or war who wants to get at 
13

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

genuine lessons in Thucydides is obliged to embark with comfortable shoes suitable for an extended journey over uneven terrain, and those adventurous enough to persevere through the 

jolting cessation of the narrative at the end of Book 8 are likely to emerge with widely varying 

perceptions of lessons learned along the way. Whether this reflects the utility or the futility of 

reading Thucydides, it is—far more than war between Athens and Sparta—inevitable. 

The History reveals many factors that influence the war decisions in both Athens and Sparta, some direct, some indirect. Each has a greater or lesser effect on the outcome, and each can 

be either positive or negative, but war occurs through decisions made by both sides. It is not 

triggered in an automatic or mechanical way, as a certain alignment of meteorological variables 

can lead unavoidably to rain and no other possible outcome. Any one of these factors, alone or 

in combination with one or more other elements, can have a profound effect on the final outcome and perhaps even prove decisive. War can thus be triggered, or avoided, due to the influence of any of these factors—seven of which are discussed below as Thucydides’ “other traps.” 

Consider, the Peloponnesian War begins with Sparta’s declaration of war on Athens in 

432 BCE, a move which formally abrogates the Thirty Years’ Peace signed between the two in 

445. Sparta’s allies, the Thebans, initiate the actual fighting in 431. Thucydides says early in the 

History that he will set forth the causes of this war, so that in future “no one may ever have to 

ask” why such a terrible war occurred in this place at this time.56 He devotes more of his text 

to this very specific question than to any single topic, apart from the Sicilian Expedition. Yet 

the explanation he provides is so dense and difficult to untangle that future generations have, 

in fact, never ceased asking about the causes of the war and arguing about the exact meaning of 

Thucydides’ proffered explanation.57

One enormous sticking point is our lack of knowledge about Athenian policy toward the 

city of Megara, a major element in the cascading web of regional disputes that led up to the outbreak of war. Both the Spartans and the Athenians attached great importance to it:

[Sparta] made very clear to the Athenians that war might be prevented if they 

revoked the Megara decree, excluding the Megarians from the use of Athenian 

harbors and of the market of Athens. But Athens was not inclined either to revoke 

the decree, or to entertain their other proposals.58

Yet we know virtually nothing about the actual provisions of the decree, or why Pericles adamantly upheld it even under the imminent threat of war.
14 

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In his magisterial volume The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix focuses intently on the, unfortunately, paltry source matter—from Aristophanes, Plutarch, and, 

Thucydides—on the vitally important Megarian Decree(s). Ste. Croix posits three, and perhaps 

four provisions, in the months leading up to the war, and chides previous generations of scholars for their careless assumptions on the matter. His theory that the Decrees were more religious 

than economic in nature has not won wide acceptance.59 Cornford’s view that the Decrees imposed rigid economic sanctions and were causing starvation in the city of Megara remains more 

widely held, but his argument draws attention to the huge gaps in our knowledge of essential 

aspects of the flurry of diplomacy that led up to the declaration of war on both sides.

It is striking that the underlying cause of the war was a matter of controversy in Athens 

following of the final Spartan victory in 404, and Thucydides notes, rather defensively, that his 

well-supported conclusions about the war “will not be disturbed either by the verses of a poet 

displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth’s expense.”60 These remarks are generally interpreted as a Thucydidean swipe at his 

famed predecessor, Herodotus,61 and also a rebuff to the comic poet Aristophanes.62

Ultimately, however, the “truth” about the origins of the Peloponnesian War remains obscure. Here is the vital summary passage from the History, including the sentence (in bold) 

seized on by Allison as the foundation of the Thucydides Trap concept:

[4] All this came upon them with the late war, which was begun by the Athenians 

and Peloponnesians by the dissolution of the thirty years’ truce made after the 

conquest of Euboea. [5] To the question why they broke the treaty, I answer by 

placing first an account of their grounds of complaint and points of difference, 

that no one may ever have to ask the immediate cause which plunged the Hellenes 

into a war of such magnitude. [6] The real cause I consider to be the one which 

was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the 

alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable. Still it is well 

to give the grounds alleged by either side which led to the dissolution of the treaty 

and the breaking out of the war.63

This identification on the “real cause” of the war is by no means as crystal clear as it might 

first appear. Power (δυναμις) in Athens and Fear (φοβος) in Sparta are unmistakably identified 

as factors in the war equation, but the mechanism of interaction between them and the broader 

nature of causality remain obscure. In fact, the key passage does not point to a specific event 
15

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

but to an undifferentiated “nexus of circumstances”64 which, in Thucydides’ opinion, contain 

the seeds of war. 

With 1.23.6, Thucydides becomes the first ancient historian to cite underlying factors, (aitiai/αἰτίαι) rather than action by the gods and/or unexplained human action, as causes of human conflict. As Seth N. Jaffe observes, this analytical passage has led many international relations theorists to claim Thucydides, prematurely, as “the archetypal realist, the first proponent 

of power politics.” While the History assuredly has much to say on the outbreak of war, once his 

references to power, fear, necessity, and causation are supplemented and contextualized within 

the unfolding episodes of Book 1, it becomes apparent that they cannot be read as an assertion 

of efficient causation in a modern, scientific sense. In short, Thucydides’ seemingly straightforward assertion about the “causes” of war is “a road-sign, not a destination.”65

In Search of Causality and Necessity: Aitiai and Prophasis

First, Thucydides’ terminology complicates the picture, particularly the introduction of 

the elements of “grounds of complaint” and “points of difference,” which together comprise the 

war’s “immediate cause.” His distinction between what Richard Crawley refers to as the “real 

cause”—(alethestate prophasis/ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις), more precisely rendered as “truest rationale”—and the “grounds alleged publicly” (aitiai es to phaneron legomenai/αἰτίαι ἐς τὸ φανερὸν 

λεγόμεναι) seems clearer but has in fact been subjected to widely varying interpretation. 

The fact that the “truest rationale” is also cited as “least spoken of ” (ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ) 

often leads new students of Thucydides to regard the prophasis and the aitiai es to phaneron as, 

respectively, concealed and acknowledged factors.66 This perception suggests, in turn, that the 

latter have been falsely contrived—perhaps by leaders in one or both cities—in a conspiratorial attempt to hide the genuine causes of the war. Such a reading is not supported by a closer 

examination of the text, however. Rather, Thucydides is drawing a distinction between a longterm prophasis (deep-seated mistrust, incipient hostility, and rising fear generated through an 

extended period of troubled bilateral relations) and more immediate aitiai (current irritants 

in the regional political and military situation). As Giovanni Parmeggiani argues, Thucydides 

identifies these two kinds of causes because there are two kinds of problems to solve. The first 

is a problem of historical contingency: How did this war actually arise at this precise time? The 

second is philosophical: Was this war accidental or necessary?67

The separation between prophasis and aitiai is thus not a distinction between primary and 

secondary considerations, nor between false and true ones. Both are part of what Tim Rood 

calls an aetiological system, revealing in a dispositive way the state of political thinking on both 
16 

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sides.68 Accordingly, both are relevant as well as essential to the all-important final outcome, 

that is, the separate decisions in Sparta and in Athens to adopt a policy of war; however, each 

is relevant in a different way. The prophasis takes precedence as being “truest” (alethestate) because it accounts for the predisposition with which decisionmakers in both cities will respond 

to the aitiai—in this case the Corcyra/Epidamnus dispute (1.24) and the Potidaea crisis (1.56). 

Without underlying fear as the prophasis, the aitiai might have been resolved through 

peaceful means, or at least not been seen as grounds for all-out military conflict. The converse is 

not true, however. Without these specific aitiai, there would have been no Peloponnesian War 

in the summer of 431, but the latent prophasis, unless altered (for example, through a sustained 

period of positive bilateral interaction), would remain to trigger escalation and war in response 

to some later incident, should one arise. The prophasis thus opens the way for the compelling 

force of necessity (ananke/αναγκε) to enter the picture. “Inevitable” is still too strong a term for 

the subtle interplay of human attitudes Thucydides describes, however. 

Without catalyzing aitiai, the underlying prophasis might have persisted for years without 

triggering actual war. Indeed, Sparta’s mistrust and fear of Athens had, by 431, already been in 

place for decades. Fear of Athenian intentions prompted the Spartans to abruptly dismiss the 

Athenian troops sent to provide humanitarian aid and security assistance following the earthquake in Sparta in 465. The rapid expansion of Athenian imperial authority was already well 

advanced by 454, when the Athenians transferred the treasury of the Delian League from Delos 

to Athens, ending all pretense that the Greek “alliance” against Persia was anything other than 

an Athenian empire. The accumulated inflammable material was thus in place for many years 

before the exact alignment of aitiai and prophasis finally triggered the “necessity” of war.69

While it is logical for Thucydides to look back on the outbreak of war as “inevitable”—since it 

has, in fact, already occurred—the alignment of factors he describes hardly constitutes a model 

for predicting the outbreak of a future war. 

Nonetheless, clarification of the distinction between aitiai and prophasis reveals underlying unity and coherence in the seemingly uneven and discursive structure of Book 1:

■ The ancient history of the Greek states provided in the Archaeology (1.2–1.23), far from 

being merely a conventional imitation of Herodotus or Homer, is structured to explain 

and substantiate the prophasis, which is a subtle, psychological factor that ordinary people 

would find difficult to recognize or comprehend (unlike the events he identifies as aitiai es 

to phaneron, which would be obvious and known to all).70

■ Similarly, the Pentecontaetia (1.89–1.117)—at first glance a mere digression into the 

rough and tumble of Spartan-Athenian political and military interaction over the half 
17

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

century preceding the war—is essential to an understanding of the aitiai that led directly 

and, in a narrow sense, inevitably, to the onset of the Peloponnesian War. 

Parmeggiani stresses that the complex interaction of prophasis and aitiai would be discernable 

only to a master of history and politics whose insight is founded upon knowledge of human nature, understanding of the nature of power and—indispensably—meticulous study of both the 

long-term political evolution of both Athens and Sparta and the details of their recent interaction.71 This thoroughgoing analysis, which provides the basis for Thucydides’ assertion that the 

Peloponnesian War was necessary at the time and in the way it occurred, has virtually nothing 

in common with the superficial, mechanistic, and casually generalized assertion that Athens 

and Sparta inevitably went to war because that is what usually happens when a rising power 

comes to be perceived as a threat to a ruling power.

Bearing in mind the fact that many Athenians wanted to come to terms with Sparta at 

the outset of the war,72 it is hard to make the case from Thucydides’ History that war is ever 

inevitable. Indeed, the only firm, citable examples in human experience consist of wars that did

happen. Perhaps innumerably more potential wars were averted, but such negative events are 

invisible. Yet in Thucydides every war decision shows some citizens who favor coming to terms 

with the enemy rather than going to war. It is perhaps natural to justify past wars (particularly 

those deemed successful) ex post facto, but hard to argue that any was inevitable.

Perhaps even more important to current discussion of a Thucydides Trap between the 

United States and China is the equally true converse: in the absence of prophasis, no variation of 

aitiai need result in war. Some prognosticators of war in the Indo-Pacific region have manifestly 

fallen into this trap, citing the existence of the island disputes—aitiai all—as rendering war inevitable. While great political theorists are free to parse international relations as they deem fit, 

no such line of analysis is supported by Thucydides’ marshaling of facts and analysis from the 

Peloponnesian War.

In fact, Thucydides regarded confusion, distortion, and deception in the debate over 

whether or not to enter a war to be commonplace, both because common people could not 

easily grasp some of the subtle, underlying forces at play and because elite participants in the 

debate often had hidden agendas and intentionally did not reveal their true motives. Contemporary Americans need look no further than our own national debate in the run-up to the 2003 

invasion of Iraq to confirm that this human proclivity is alive and well. Some American decisionmakers were taken in, as were the Athenians, by reports from would-be allies that proved 

“as attractive as it was untrue.”73
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Fear, Honor, and Interest, and Thucydides’ other “Traps”

Thucydides simply does not say that war between the Athenians and the Spartans is “inevitable” in the clear and unambiguous sense conveyed by the translated passage that Allison 

quotes from Book 1 of the History. Moreover, there is no indication that the historian intends 

his problematic and manifestly incomplete analysis of the cause(s) of their war to stand as a 

normative model that explains all great power wars. 

In fact, what the historian does say about war leads in the opposite direction, toward a narrow and idiosyncratic explanation for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In the 5th century 

(as today), war was both a legal state and a condition of actual, ongoing engagement between 

hostile forces. Crucially, war then (as now) typically began with a political decision prior to the 

deployment of forces. 

Any exploration of causality must thus take into account the three great factors that 

Thucydides identifies as the drivers of state decisionmaking in peace and war: Fear (phobos/

φοβος), Honor (doxa/δοξα), and Interest (kerdos/κερδος).74 Former National Security Advisor 

H.R. McMaster noted the continuing relevance of these factors in a 2013 published work that 

has drawn renewed attention in recent months: “War is human. People fight today for the same 

fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: Fear, 

Honor and Interest.”75 Weaker parties (allies) can manipulate stronger ones using these basic 

motives, whereas the strong have options of their own.76

These three elements, either singly or in some combination, shape all political decisionmaking.77 The interplay of the three unfailingly leads every state to see its own position as just, 

and those who oppose it as unjust, irrespective of whether a state embarks on a course of war. 

This is arguably Thucydides’ single most galvanizing insight into human nature. In another 

literary touch, Thucydides juxtaposes these underlying influences with the more visible but less 

significant factors often cited in decisions of whether to go to war: military capacity, quality of 

leadership, and depth of patriotism.78 His model of political action reveals a dynamic relationship among human nature, state politics, and war. Thucydides’ explanation of the origins of the 

Peloponnesian War is thus keyed, not to the compulsion of rise and fear, but rather to the complex interplay of Fear, Honor, and Interest in both Athens and Sparta. Leon Whyte aptly applies 

this framework to contemporary geopolitics: “If the United States and China fight a war, it will 

occur because of the same fear and honor that led the Spartans to start the Peloponnesian War, 

or the Athenians to continue it.”79
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

While it is not his aim to provide a conceptual model as such, Thucydides, over the course 

of the History, identifies a number of secondary factors that tend to influence the interplay of 

Fear, Honor, and Interest in national decisionmaking. Each of these can, in itself, pose another 

trap—leading to unnecessary war—or, with sound judgment (and/or luck) offer a means of 

escape from such a conflict. Subsequent sections briefly highlight seven of these: national character, governing system, domestic tranquility, economic power, leaders, allies and alliances, and 

the role of Tyké (chance) in peace and war. 

Trap 1: National Character

For Thucydides, the stark contrast between Athenian and Spartan culture—not only regarding political arrangements, but also in the fundamental values and norms that shape each 

society—reflects an aspect of collective human nature that looms large in questions of peace 

and war. The question of democracy vs. oligarchy—which is a better governing system?—is a 

subsidiary problem. While Pericles makes a resounding defense of Athens’ national character 

as superior, what Thucydides stresses above all is that Athenians and Spartans are driven by 

profoundly different values and personal motivations. The Corinthians’ pre-war speech before 

the assembled Spartans and allies underscores these differences.80 This was, however, seldom an 

obstacle to responsible decisionmaking by Athenian and Spartan leaders because each knew the 

other well. Instances in which one side misreads the other are few.

Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians, Thebans, Plataeans, and Corcyraeans are each driven 

by a unique and idiosyncratic combination of policy considerations under the three rubrics of 

Fear, Honor, and Interest. The Athenians want to keep their growing empire and the revenue it 

yields, which has become essential for ongoing reconstruction of the city, as well as pay citizens 

for participation in the councils and assemblies that constitute the democracy. The Corinthians 

want to retain their paramount influence in the northeast Peloponnese and humble their troublesome former colony, Corcyra.81 The Corcyraeans want to escape Corinthian hegemony and 

maximize their own independence, even if this means accepting subject-ally status under the 

Athenians. The Spartans want nothing so much as quiet enjoyment of their domestic tranquility, reflecting an ingrained conservatism for which their Corinthian allies chide them bitterly. It 

would be as wrong to ascribe identical motivations to all four as it would be to ascribe identical 

foreign policy goals to the United States and China today. While U.S. support for a rules-based 

post–World War II global trading system and Chinese insistence on (re-)gaining (traditional 

and inherently merited) great power status after a “century of humiliation” may or may not be 

incompatible goals, but they are certainly not identical goals. Yet the Thucydides Trap concept 
20 

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requires that each be seen as motivated solely by calculations of relative power keyed to power 

transition theory as a variant of the traditional security dilemma.

A degree of shared attention to the Thucydides Trap does not indicate that American and 

Chinese leaders have attained a similar level of mutual comprehension. On the contrary, mirrored mistrust and misperception are routinely evident in statements one side directs at the 

other. The continuing debate within China over the country’s recovery of international stature 

following a “century of humiliation,” little noted in the United States, illustrates the point. That 

debate is linked, in turn, to the tradeoff between keeping a low profile and striving for achievement.

In the early 1990s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping invoked a foreign policy strategy of 

taoguangyanghui (keeping a low profile, or KLP). Under this approach, China concentrated on 

domestic development while avoiding extensive engagement outside its borders. Key phrases of 

the KLP policy included “undertaking no leadership” and “raising no banner,” both calculated 

to avoid zero-sum rivalry with the United States that might impede China’s internal economic 

boom. 

In October 2013, President Xi Jinping announced the shift to a foreign policy strategy of 

fenfayouwei (striving for achievement, or SFA). Some Chinese scholars and officials still question whether SFA is likely to yield a better international environment for China, but Xi’s policies—including island development, frequent foreign travel, and the “One Belt, One Road” 

initiative—indicate that SFA is the prevailing view of China’s leadership today. While KLP left 

American dominance of the international system unchallenged, SFA implies increased Chinese 

involvement in global affairs. Whether U.S. leaders comprehend this change as hegemonic and 

threatening or incremental and historically logical could have a huge impact on bilateral relations in coming years.82

A much-discussed Xinhua article in April 2015 turned the KLP/SFA question on its head, 

arguing that the United States under President Obama had itself shifted toward a policy of KLP 

due to a continuing preoccupation with domestic economic issues.83 How China assesses the 

intentions and capacity of the Trump administration will, in turn, influence Xi’s decisions about 

China’s own transition from KLP to SFA.

Trap 2: Governing System

Thucydides subscribes to the notion that human nature dictates characteristic patterns of 

behavior, especially under the threat of war, but he also discerns in the behavior of Athens and 

Sparta (and to a lesser degree in other major participants in the Peloponnesian War) distinctive 
21

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

cultural tendencies that are at tension with the universal patterns of humanity. This adds an additional dynamic to national decisionmaking. The mode of national decisionmaking adopted by 

each side reflects this distinction and, in turn, influences each side’s policy choices. The respective characters (tropoi/τρόποι) of Athens and Sparta color their foreign policies and influence 

how the dynamic interaction between the two cities, influenced by the distinctive necessities 

that press upon each, ultimately leads to the collapse of the Hellenic status quo.84

As Jeremy Mynott emphasizes, the structure of governance influences “the role of rhetoric 

and argument, which may take on a different kind of importance in a predominantly oral culture; the forms of public pressure and support that can be exerted through established institutions in the different kinds of polity; and the relative importance of individuals, social classes, 

ruling groups and international relationships in reaching decisions.”85 It is not just that a rising 

power is colliding with a status quo power; the matter hinges on the exact character of both and 

the contrast between them. The necessity of war, insofar as it determines the outcome, arises 

from the particular interaction of these two radically different societies and their equally divergent approaches to national security, rather than from any universal paradigm of great power 

transition. For the United States and China, similarly, it will be important to understand each 

other’s modes of national decisionmaking and the sort of public expressions associated with the 

normal processes of government.

Trap 3: Domestic Tranquility

As both Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes recognized, one of Thucydides’ most 

powerful insights is his recognition of the corrosive impact of stasis—factional infighting, often 

between (pro-Spartan) oligarchs and (pro-Athenian) masses—on sociopolitical stability. It afflicts nearly every polis in Greece, including Athens, often with a significant effect on the war, 

and Thucydides notes that this was a problem for Greeks in earlier ages as well.86 In this respect, 

he makes the point that a tendency toward internecine conflict seems to be an enduring feature 

of human nature, as the most cultured and up-to-date Greeks in his own time seem no less 

prone to it than their ancient forebears. His vivid portrayal of the moral collapse resulting from 

stasis is a major component of his broad insight—revealed incrementally over the course of the 

History—of the interplay between human nature, the human condition, and war: 

In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments, because 

they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but 
22 

Misenheimer

war takes away the easy supply of daily wants and so proves a rough master that 

brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.87

Public acceptance of the rationale for conflict matters in this context. From the time of 

the First Crusade, Western nations have found it necessary to adduce a “just” basis for conflict. 

While the outbreak of conflict typically elicits an initial outpouring of fervid support for “our” 

forces (and our leader), the rationale adduced for the war—especially whether most citizens 

deem it a convincing argument for the justness of “our” cause—plays a role in the staying power 

of our war effort. President Woodrow Wilson during World War I and Presidents Franklin 

Roosevelt and Harry Truman during World War II invested enormous effort in honing the message and delivering it to the American people, in part because they recognized that the scope 

of the conflict—a negative factor amplified by the distance from home—obliged them to do so. 

This will pose challenges for U.S. leaders in any future conflict in the Indo-Pacific region and in 

power maneuvering through measures short of war. 

Chinese commentators in recent years have tended to overperceive the U.S. domestic focus 

on job creation and other economic concerns as an exaggerated sign of national decline. On 

the U.S. side, economists speculate endlessly on how long the Chinese can sustain double-digit 

annual growth and on how severe the popular backlash will be when growth slows. Sustaining 

domestic support is vital for both China and the United States.88

Trap 4: Economic Power

Thucydides was no economist, but he is justly recognized as the first historian to appreciate the importance of wealth as an aspect of national power. He gives the wise and decisive (but 

impecunious) Spartan King Archidamus, who felt sharply the disadvantage of battling a well-financed adversary, one of the History’s famous maxims: “War is a matter not so much of arms as 

of money, which makes arms of use.”89 Thucydides returns to financial matters repeatedly over 

the course of war, emphasizing the immense cost of the Sicilian expedition and noting Athenian 

efforts—like the desperate imposition of a 5 percent tax on their subject-allies—to sustain cash 

flow and trim costs. The Athenians are hard-pressed to sustain the revenues necessary to cover 

the burgeoning cost of two simultaneous wars.90 Over time, the Athenian treasury is inexorably 

depleted, while the Spartans eventually obtain foreign (Persian) funding sufficient to support a 

navy capable of defeating the Athenians.

For China, money tells the contemporary story. In the 1950s, the Chinese government 

had none. Today, Beijing is spending lavishly around the world, particularly in the Indo-Pacific 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

region, but also in Africa and beyond, to influence policies and draw new friends. A familiar 

joke notes that China has a market-Leninist system administered by a Communist Party in 

which nobody believes in communism. Widely publicized investments in port and transportation infrastructure in Australia and other Asian states (including a new Jakarta-Bandung fast 

train in Indonesia) are modernizing regional logistics and opening doors. The trillion-dollar 

“One Belt, One Road” project represents a monumental effort to reshape regional trade to Chinese specifications. Chas Freeman notes that the Obama administration played the economic 

angle poorly vis-à-vis the Chinese in Asia: 

Rather than facilitating the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes by the 

claimants, it embeds these disputes in Sino-American rivalry and promotes their 

militarization. Rather than working together to reform or replace outmoded 

international financial institutions and practices, it presumes that China and 

America are at cross purposes.91

It is important to recognize that China, even while expanding its military capabilities, is 

establishing itself as the Indo-Pacific region’s chief investor and peacemaker, from investing in 

high-profile projects across the region to mediating an end to the world’s longest running civil 

war—the Kachin resistance to the 1962 coup d’etat that installed in Rangoon a junta drawn from 

the ethnic Burmese majority. These are the actions of a player—the biggest player in the history 

of the world—who knows the rules established by the Washington Consensus and is willing to 

buy into the game at the full price of admission, but is also learning to leverage its economic 

power to expand global influence. 

Trap 5: Leaders

In Thucydides’ History, leaders transcend process and circumstance to exert enormous 

influence in both war and statecraft. Just as Carl von Clausewitz recognizes military genius as an 

important imponderable of war, Thucydides sees the impact that each leader’s uniquely different ledger of assets and liabilities has on the outcome of politics and war. Though national character is consistent, a change in leadership transforms decisionmaking and alters the trajectory 

of events. Athens under Pericles is prudent and consistent, subordinating operational decisions 

to a coherent (if controversial) grand strategy. But under Cleon, Hyperbolus, and Alcibiades 

(after Pericles succumbs to the plague), the city’s decisions become rash and erratic with no 

clear guiding principle or long-term plan. Diodotus’ success in opposing Cleon in the matter of 
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Mytilene shows the power of leadership as well as the fluidity and unpredictability of strategic 

decisionmaking.92 Similarly, Spartans commanded by Brasidas are innovative, resourceful, and 

successful in ways not seen with other Spartan forces before or after.93

In Book 6, the twists and turns of the war in Sicily demonstrate anew the contrast between 

sound leadership and its opposite. Hermocrates the Syracusan and Gylippus the Spartan exemplify a standard of personal honor, strategic vision, and tactical savvy that sets them apart 

from men like the slow-witted Anaxagoras, who are timid, blinkered, or cowardly in facing the 

Athenian threat. In Athens, the speeches of Nicias and Alcibiades, respectively opposing and 

advocating the Sicilian adventure, pose an even starker contrast.94 Nicias sensibly warns of exactly the sort of disasters that eventually befall the Athenian armada, while the brash Alcibiades 

belittles the enemy and dazzles the assembly with talk of gain and glory.95

Thucydides’ meticulous account of the Sicilian Expedition can easily be read as a simple 

morality tale: An unprovoked war of aggression invites divine wrath against the proud Athenians.96 After six decades of magnificent achievement at home and abroad, including creation 

of “the greatest empire yet known, of present or former times, among the Hellenes,”97 the Athenians now suffer calamitous downfall.

Thucydides reveals, as he seldom does, his own view that Alcibiades’ support of the invasion is motivated more by personal ambition than patriotism, yet he does not reduce the difference to caricature—Alcibiades is a megalomaniacal narcissist and a traitor, but also a charismatic leader of troops and an ingenious tactician. Nicias, though cited by the historian as “the 

most fortunate general of his time,” is also dilatory and fatally foolish in Sicily, not least in his 

irresponsible decision to delay withdrawal from the island for 27 days on the advice of (previously unmentioned) soothsayers after a lunar eclipse sparks amazement. Thucydides nevertheless comments later that Nicias, “of all the Hellenes in my time, least deserved such a fate” (that 

is, butchery at his enemy’s hands) because “the whole course of his life had been regulated with 

strict attention to virtue.” But did he deserve that horrid fate less than the tens of thousands of 

troops under his command who also perished because of his manifest ineptitude in the final 

stages of the war?98 For Thucydides, Nicias’ quality of earnestness, perhaps combined with his 

prior service—including negotiation of the peace with Sparta, which proves all too brief—seem 

to outweigh his deficient performance. Yet logic would suggest that Demosthenes and Lamachus, who both also died at Syracuse, are equally deserving of the regard that Thucydides accords to Nicias alone.99

Plato resurrects Nicias in his dialogue Laches as an interlocutor with whom Socrates engages on the topic of courage.100 Plato’s decision to use Nicias as an expert participant in a 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

discussion of military education and the nature of courage suggests that the Athenian people 

at the time—no more than three decades after the Sicilian Expedition—still esteemed him and 

did not regard his failure in Sicily as dishonorable. It is striking, nonetheless, to note that the 

Laches places Nicias in a discussion of courage not only in war, but also in public and private 

life. Though unfailingly brave in battle (if unduly cautious and prone to vacillation), Nicias in 

Thucydides’ telling shows political cowardice in failing to reveal to the Athenian people the 

precarious circumstances of the Athenian army before Syracuse. Accordingly, “his life in itself 

illustrates the importance, recognized by Socrates, of cultivating courage in all the arenas of action and suffering.”101 As a leader, Nicias is problematic. Ultimately, it is not his superiority to 

Alcibiades, but his inferiority to Pericles that must define his legacy.

In the final book of the History, the Athenians are desperate for sound leadership as they 

struggle to rebuild their own naval capacity and avoid a further disaster but never find it. Alcibiades’ period of renewed leadership brings tactical improvement but is undermined by his drive 

for personal, not national, success. Phrynicus, a “man of sense,” is undermined by the jealousy 

of others. Worse is to come. On the Spartan side, leadership is better overall but still notoriously 

inconsistent. While Lysander (whose successes are chronicled by Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon in their respective volumes that take up the Ionian War at the point where Thucydides 

leaves off) is brilliant and irreproachable, other Spartan leaders run the gamut from the insecure Astyocus to the spineless, pettifogging Therimenes. Lichas seems at first high-minded and 

forthright, but proves inconstant. Thucydides makes it clear that every government is hardpressed to find clear-thinking, reliable leaders.102

In early 2017, Graham Allison stated that the election of Donald Trump has heightened 

his pessimism over U.S.-China relations: “If Hollywood were producing a blockbuster on China 

and the U.S. on the path to war, central casting could not have come up with a better lead for 

Team America than our president.”103 Nonetheless, interaction between U.S. and Chinese leaders through the first year of the Trump administration has been relatively positive. Inevitably, 

U.S. perception of the character and intent of China’s leaders will determine whether statements 

such as this are heard as conciliatory or threatening:

The argument that strong countries are bound to seek hegemony does not apply 

to China. This is not in the DNA of this country, given our long historical and 

cultural background. China fully understands that we need a peaceful and stable 

internal and external environment to develop ourselves. We all need to work 

together to avoid the Thucydides trap—destructive tensions between an emerging 
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power and established powers. Our aim is to foster a new model of major country 

relations.104

It is worth recalling that U.S. and Chinese leaders succeeded in maintaining stable relations 

and preventing the development of a war-demanding prophasis during the Cold War, when the 

volume of bilateral trade (always one measure of the financial cost a war would impose on both 

sides) was negligible. Now, facing new aitiai (contentious island claims), as well as a burgeoning commercial relationship and the serious risk of a North Korea conflict that would be costly 

for both sides, Presidents Xi and Trump can find in Thucydides both positive and negative 

examples worthy of their attention. Famed Thucydides scholar Donald Kagan reminds us that 

the Peloponnesian War “was caused by men who made bad decisions in difficult circumstances. 

Neither the circumstances nor the decisions were inevitable.”105

Trap 6: Allies and Alliances

Thucydides identifies the beginning of the great war of his time with one “overt act”: the 

surprise assault by Thebes (a key Spartan ally) on its hated neighbor Plataea (Athens’ oldest 

ally) in 431 BCE.106 In fact, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of alliances in 

Thucydides’ view of both macro-war and the moral predilections of the humans who wage it. 

He even identifies the ability of Greek poleis in prior centuries to collaborate on a large scale 

(especially in war) as a crucial threshold between primitive and modern.107

The acquisition of allies is a visible and crucially important metric of a great power’s status. 

This is reflected even in the Spartans’ repeated assertion that their war aim is to “liberate” the 

far-flung poleis of the Greek-speaking world from Athenian domination. Consider Sparta’s final 

ultimatum to Athens in the run-up to war: “Sparta wishes the peace to continue, and there is 

no reason why it should not, if you would let the Hellenes be independent.” The statement is 

precisely crafted so as to enhance Sparta’s standing with (current and potential) allies and to 

drive a wedge between Athens and the allies whose tribute payments sustain Athenian naval 

supremacy. The Spartan goal is not to bring freedom (eleutheria/ἐλευθερία) in a modern sense, 

but to free the Greek city states from their status as tribute-paying subject-allies of Athens. States 

enjoying autonomy (autonomia/αὐτονομία) will naturally incline toward future backing for the 

power that engineered their “liberation,” so Sparta’s own standing would rise in step with the 

decline of Athenian power.108

The making and breaking of alliances is a decisive factor in the Peloponnesian War, as 

battlefield victories for both Athens and Sparta typically hinge on the backing they are accorded, 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

or denied, by erstwhile allies.109 Both also fall victim to a hazard of war that Thucydides has 

Athenian envoys warn against early on: “taking the wrong course on matters of great importance by yielding too readily to the persuasions of . . . allies.”110 British researcher Christopher 

Coker frames the implications of this fact for the United States and China as they interact across 

the vast expanse of the Western Pacific: “Do not allow your state to be manipulated into war.” 

He continues:

This accords with the story Thucydides actually tells: Neither Athens nor Sparta 

sought war, but somehow war came. Athens was convinced by another citystate, Corcyra, to protect it from the interference of a Spartan ally, Corinth. The 

Corinthians then convinced the Spartans to intervene on their side against the 

rapacious Athenians, and thus a “war like no other” began. A shift in power 

may or may not have been a necessary condition for the Peloponnesian War. 

But the way in which Athens and Sparta were manipulated by their lesser allies 

surely was.111

Allies were no less central in the fateful Athenian decision to invade Sicily, 800 miles away, and 

in the eventual crushing defeat of Athenian forces there.112

In the Aegean world, as in Asia today, the number and strength of allies is an important 

metric of capacity and influence, a visible reflection of status as a great power. While overall 

the U.S. network of allies in the Indo-Pacific region appears strong and durable, China has 

exploited the anti-American views of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who has 

placed the United States in the awkward position of the Spartan general Brasidas when the 

people of Acanthus balk at accepting his offer of assistance to “liberate” them from Athenian 

domination: “I am . . . astonished at finding your gates shut against me, and at not meeting with 

a better welcome.”113

For the United States, sustaining cooperation with regional allies without being manipulated by them remains a policy necessity. As Freeman underscores, “China’s neighbors want 

American help to hedge against Chinese power even as they strive to reach an accommodation to it,”114 but it remains for the United States to aggregate its strength in a way that will 

benefit itself. At the same time, Lam Peng Er of Singapore’s East Asian Institute (and a critic of 

the Thucydides Trap concept) has noted that “it is not inconceivable that smaller Chinese and 

American allies in East Asia might well drag the United States and China into a conflict rather 

than a conflict directly caused by the ‘power transition’ between the two great powers per se.”115
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Trap 7: The Role of Tykē (Chance) in Peace and War

Further undermining the idea that war (or anything in it) is “inevitable” is Thucydides’ 

frequent emphasis on the unexpected and the unpredicted. Homer epitomized the traditional 

Greek view of querulous Olympian gods whose selfish, partisan agendas stir conflict among 

hapless mortals. But the only preternatural element acknowledged in the History is chance, 

or Tyké (Tύχη), which plays a significant but unpredictable role in shaping war. An Athenian 

delegation visiting Sparta before the war sums up the matter succinctly: “Consider the vast influence of accident in war, before you are engaged in it.”116 Pericles directs a similar admonition 

to his fellow Athenians: “Sometimes the course of things is as arbitrary as the plans of man; . . . 

this is why we usually blame chance for whatever does not happen as we expected.”117 A fearful 

acknowledgement of the power of chance pervades the History.

In this, Thucydides anticipates Clausewitz, who also ascribes great significance to the 

random, unforeseen, and unforeseeable in war and does not expect divine intervention. For 

Thucydides, Tyké is an imponderable factor lurking in the friction and fog of war. The weak 

should not depend on it for salvation, and the strong cannot discount it as a potential counterweight to seemingly overwhelming military strength. Tyké has an endless capacity—from 

battlefield intelligence revealed to be false, to altogether unforeseeable events like the eclipse 

during Nicias’ retreat from Syracuse and the storm following the Athenian naval victory at 

Arginousae—for delivering “the surprises which upset human calculations.”118 Recognition of 

the uncertainty of interstate relations in peace as well as war helps equip a leader for the most 

difficult challenges of statesmanship.

Assessing the “Allison Trap”

Publication of Destined for War elicited a few critical reviews.119 But, as British classicist 

Neville Morley and others have observed, the predominant response to the Thucydides Trap 

concept across the foreign policy community in the United States and elsewhere over the past 6 

years has been uncritical acceptance of the notion that a grave normative trap for Washington 

and Beijing exists in the pages of Thucydides. In effect, credulity has filled the space that should 

have been reserved for critical engagement and analysis. Yet, as the preceding section attempted 

to show, Allison’s notion of a Thucydides Trap is simply not supported by Thucydides’ text. 

Changing the name to the “Allison Trap” might therefore be preferable. Dropping the ancient 

historian’s name would detract nothing from Allison’s work except an unmerited air of respectability conferred by the Thucydides “brand.”120
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The use we make of ancient authorities in contemporary policymaking must be guided 

by rigorous scholarship. Specifically, if Thucydides’ analysis of the war that shaped his age has 

value for us today, as I believe it does, that value will emerge only from attentive reading of the 

entire History. This means coming to grips with the manifold difficulties of its uneven and idiosyncratic text rather than seizing on a single line taken out of context as the distilled epitome 

of Thucydidean wisdom. 

A closer look reveals additional shortcomings. Even though Allison devotes many pages 

of Destined for War to a review of events leading up to the onset of the Peloponnesian War, his 

Thucydides Trap metaphor does not accord with those events. As T. Greer incisively notes,

A review of the origins and first moments of this war suggests that it was less a 

matter of growing fear and growing power, than a matter of tarnished honor and 

quests for glory. Athens’ growing wealth was a necessary condition for the war, 

but it was hardly the only or the most important cause of it. Had Athens’ quest for 

glory been less ambitious, had Sparta not tied herself to an ally hellbent on forcing 

her private wars and narrow interests onto the entire league of Spartan allies, and 

had the Greeks not been a people obsessed with insults, rank, and honor, this war 

may never have occurred. It was not an inevitable clash of fear and power that 

brought war to Hellas, but a very specific set of decisions made by a very specific 

set of leaders in the years before the war.121

Even Allison’s assertion of a transition from peace to war in 431 BCE is problematic. The 

thousand-plus Greek city states of the 5th century, grouped into shifting alliances around Sparta 

and Athens, had already been locked in nearly continuous warfare for more than 50 years prior 

to the Peloponnesian War. Athens had already been at war 2 out of every 3 years for more than a 

century, never once enjoying more than 10 consecutive years of peace. Thus, while Thucydides 

insists that the conflict that began in 431 was a new war, not all scholars share that view. Athens 

and Sparta fought a “First Peloponnesian War” from 460 to 446, and Ste. Croix, among others, 

sees not a new war in 432, but one long conflict stretching from 460 to 404 (much as some war 

historians look at World War I and World War II as “The Long War”).

Allison’s characterization of Sparta as a “ruling” power and Athens as “rising” is equally 

suspect. Among Greek city-states, Sparta had been preeminent in land war for seven centuries, 

but Athens had also long been a major power, possessing not only the capacity but also the 

will to undertake bold military initiatives with minimal allied support, including aiding the 
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Greek poleis of Asia Minor against Persian encroachment, meeting and defeating the Persians at 

Marathon and uniting the entire Greek-speaking world in an all-or-nothing bid to resist Persian 

conquest that, prior to the naval victory at Salamis in the autumn of 480, would have appeared 

foolhardy. 

By the time the Peloponnesian War began in 431, Athens had thus been “rising” for nearly 

a century and had long since converted the pan-Hellenic anti-Persian alliance into an Athenian 

empire. The Spartans recognized, but did not fear, Athens’ growing activism and military capacity as early as 520, when Plataea appealed to Sparta for an alliance to fend off Thebes. The 

Spartans actually urged the Plataeans to ally instead with Athens, thus enhancing the power 

and reach of the Athenians in a region (Boeotia) under Spartan hegemony.122 Sparta hoped to 

contain Athens by preventing reconstruction of the Long Walls linking the city to the port of 

Piraeus, but in the end acquiesced to the Athenians’ surreptitious building program with no 

more than a stiff demarche. 

By 465, fear of Athens’ military power led the Spartans to insult the Athenians by rejecting 

their proffered military assistance after a devastating earthquake and consequent Helot uprising in Sparta’s home region. It is difficult, however, to discern a basis for a sudden crescendo of 

Spartan fear that made war with Athens “inevitable” in 431.

Furthermore, the actual course of pre-war Spartan decisionmaking as recorded by 

Thucydides (apart from the historian’s one-line summary judgment in 1.24.6) has no visible 

rising/ruling dynamic. The Spartans are spurred to declare war, not by evident fear of Athenian 

power, but by incessant browbeating from their Corinthian allies (who were motivated, in turn, 

by the narrow and specific fear of losing Epidamnus to Corcyra, which was, at the time, seeking 

assistance from Athens). 

We can add to this the fact that the Athenians, once accused of violating the Thirty Years’ 

Peace that had ended the First Peloponnesian War in 464, offered to accept binding arbitration 

under the terms of that treaty:

■ In Sparta, King Archidamus recommends delay, in the hope (though not the certainty) 

that war might thus be avoided altogether. Sthenelaidas overcomes that prudent advice 

through a passionate appeal, not to fear but to honor: “Vote therefore, Spartans, for war, 

as the honor of Sparta demands, and neither allow the further aggrandizement of Athens, 

nor betray our allies to ruin.”123 (It is, notably, the Corinthians who have shaped their 

arguments to make the Spartans feel the sting of wounded honor, as well as the pointed 

demands of manipulative allies.124) The ephor’s central argument aligns with the prophasis

but is not identical with it. The Spartans thus choose war by not following conventional 

procedure (that is, accepting the King’s recommendation).
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

■ For their part, the Athenians request arbitration, their right under the Thirty Years’ 

Peace. They opt for a policy of war (albeit an unprecedented and unusual war, involving 

confinement of the rural Attic population inside the city walls and confining offensive 

operations to relatively low-cost, low-risk coastal raids) only when the Spartans, against 

expectation, reject arbitration.

Far from challenging Sparta with destruction of the existing power balance, Periclean Athens offered to accept the limits imposed by the status quo ante. It is thus Sparta’s decision (again, goaded by Corinth) to reject arbitration rather than Athens’ provocations that precipitated the war.125

From an analytical standpoint, the Thucydides Trap fallaciously presumes to take local, 

idiosyncratic circumstances and elevate them to the level of eternal principle. To the extent 

that Thucydides judges the interplay of prophasis and aitiai to invoke anangke (necessity) and 

ignite the Peloponnesian War, that compulsion is narrowly and specifically cited as existing 

between those two Greek city-states at that time, under the influence of particular, specified 

circumstances. Allison reduces a “concatenation of circumstances”126 to simple declaration of 

inevitability, even though Thucydides neither asserts a normative principle about the collision 

of rising/ruling powers nor provides an adequate basis for inferring one in the pre-war interaction of Sparta and Athens. As his inclusion of both the Archaeology and the Pentecontaetia as 

formal digressions in Book 1 of the History makes overwhelmingly clear, even if Spartan fear of 

rising Athenian power contributed to the outbreak of war in 431, it did so for reasons uniquely 

and inseparably linked to 5th-century Greece and 50 years of dynamic, shared history between 

its two most powerful states. 

It is also important to recall that Thucydides is writing about events that have already occurred, and is therefore attempting to reason out why those events must have occurred as they 

did. This logical, backward-looking perspective has nothing in common with Allison’s effort 

to contrive an analytical framework for predicting future events.127 Looking back, the outbreak 

of the war would naturally appear inevitable in the strict sense that it had actually happened. 

Martin Ostwald frames the conclusion: “If the ‘truest prophasis’ (ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις) of the 

outbreak of the Peloponnesian war is that, in view of the situation prevailing in the Greek world 

at the time, it was necessary for it to break out, we may assume that [Thucydides] selected his 

facts with a view to demonstrating this necessity.”128

More broadly, the difficulty and unevenness of Thucydides’ text necessitates a quotient of 

humility in attempting to distill from it principles applicable over time. The historian spent 30 

years or more in composition, but left no account of a quarter of the war. What we do have is 

incomplete and unevenly edited; sections were written at widely disparate times and we have 
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no way of knowing how much the author deemed final. As Anthony Andrewes notes, “Clearly 

there is much to be learnt from the study of Thucydides, but too much insistence on the unity 

of his thought may be dangerous.”129

More to the point, keying analysis solely to the power dynamic between rival states to 

the exclusion of other considerations (including quality of leadership; system of government; 

mode of decisionmaking; domestic stability; economic interest; structure, will, and capacity of 

military alliance structures; culture; and values) trivializes and oversimplifies a complex analysis. Allison’s posited understanding of the danger of great power rivalry based solely on 1.23.6 

is thus an absurdly narrow view of what Thucydides has to say about inter-state relations. As 

Morley points out, it would be equally (in)defensible to seize on the Melian Dialogue and argue that Thucydides believes powerful states can do whatever they wish, including committing 

genocide, without fear of consequences.130

In his many published references to the risk of a U.S.-China war, Allison confutes disparate 

factors—including the prospect of economic sorpasso, the risk of unplanned escalation consequent to a minor military incident (over island claims), and the possibility of regional escalation due to North Korean actions—and calls them all the Thucydides Trap. Yet if North Korea 

initiates or catalyzes a war in Asia (a feasible scenario, as it has been for more than half a century), that conflict will not be the result of a Thucydides Trap.131 Allison’s expression of concern 

about escalation from minor irritants (aitiai) in the South (or East) China Sea is particularly 

un-Thucydidean, as the Peloponnesian War did not come about in that way. As argued above, 

without an insurmountable prophasis of fear and mistrust built up over at least half a century, 

the aitiai that touched off the war need not have resulted in conflict at all.

The interplay of prophasis and aitiai yielded—within the state decisionmaking apparatus 

of both Sparta and Athens—a heightened probability of war, but by no means a certainty. War 

was not inevitable, as both Athens and Sparta reviewed their capabilities and options at length 

before adopting a carefully considered choice to go to war. They were not overtaken by events 

(like European leaders at the outbreak of World War I).

Finally, it is striking that Allison has apparently made no effort in 6 years to formulate a 

more rigorous linkage between his theory and the actual text of the History. Instead, he and his 

students at Harvard’s Belfer Center have attempted to buttress it with a “Thucydides Trap Case 

File” (see appendix) purporting to list examples of Thucydides Trap interaction—that is, the 

clash of “rising” and “ruling” powers—from centuries past. In 12 of 16 cited instances in which 

a rising power bumps heads with a ruling power, the result is war. When new Chinese leader Xi 

Jinping visited the United States for the first time in 2013, Allison invoked this 12-for-16 batting 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

average in asking rhetorically, “Can Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi successfully defy those odds?”132

This tendentious question invites a response. Those “odds” are based on the Case File, which in 

fact provides no basis at all. Its crippling deficiencies include:

■ Selection bias. The list is meant to support a normative theory valid worldwide, for all 

cultures, and across the span of human history; yet the very few examples selected cover 

only the past five centuries, with a near-total emphasis on Europe. The sample set appears 

arbitrary. Why only these conflicts? If the rising/ruling dynamic is to be accepted as a normal pattern in human behavior, why are no examples adduced from Africa, Asia, or the 

indigenous peoples of the Americas or Oceania?133

■ Incommensurability. The circumstances and decision mechanics that led to a “war” or 

“no war” outcome in the cited cases are so disparate and dissimilar—including a mix of 

idiosyncratic megalomania, religious passion, and a few instances of “modern” racist and 

nationalist impulses—that the supposed working of some single, unified, and inexorable 

theory in all is simply not visible. The radical asymmetry of the cases deprives the “file” of 

explanatory power and coherence. 

■ The changing nature of power. European conflicts in the centuries cited often involved 

rival claims to land, as the “rise” of a state typically meant territorial expansion. No such 

zero-sum problem exists between the United States and China today.

■ The changing character of war. The appendix shows that the three most recent cited 

cases in the original (2015) iteration of the Case File—all dating from the age of nuclear 

weapons—resulted in “no war.” This begs the question of whether the advent of nuclear 

weapons has negated the supposedly “inevitable” workings of the Thucydides Trap.134

It was perhaps to obviate such criticism that the Belfer Center took the astonishing step of altering the data set. An updated (2017) Case File chart prepared for the publication of Destined for 

War deletes one example (1970s–1980s: Soviet Union [ruling] vs. Japan [rising]: no war) and 

substitutes another not previously included in the data set (late 15th century: Portugal [ruling] 

vs. Spain [rising]: no war). The effect is to eliminate the clumping of “no war” outcomes in the 

post–World War II age of nuclear weapons and create the visual impression of a Thucydides 

Trap mechanism that yields “war” and “no war” outcomes in a fairly even distribution over the 

selected 500-year period.

This obvious rigging of the “research” vitiates any authority the Case File might have had. 

It is simply not a credible body of academic research on which a hypothesis might be ventured. 

Rather, it is manifestly an ex post facto contrivance keyed to a prefabricated theory.135
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Morley has characterized the Thucydides Trap as a “meme,” lamenting the all-too-familiar 

phenomenon of pulling out isolated ideas from Thucydides or lines from his characters’ speeches and giving them marquee treatment as principles or rules. Unfortunately, he concludes, 

This is the Thucydides that, clearly, many readers want, especially when it comes 

to international relations; the fact that this isn’t the sort of Thucydides we actually 

have doesn’t really matter when we have a whole structure of discourse that turns 

his work into precisely the sort of pedlar of foreign policy maxims for which there’s 

a demand.136

Conclusions: Destined for Difficult Diplomacy, Not for War

Over the past 6 years, Graham Allison has tirelessly pushed a dark and downbeat message 

on U.S.-China relations: Both “Trump and Xi view the nation the other leads as the principal 

obstacle to achieving their core ambition.” They need to find consensus on “a new form of great 

power relations,” but “if they settle for business as usual, we are likely to get history as usual, 

where the odds of war are against us.” Provocative maneuvering by Taiwan could become “the 

shortest path to war between the United States and China.” Overall, war is “more likely than 

not” (which presumably accounts for the absence of a question mark in the primary component 

of his book’s title: Destined for War).137

As Allison himself points out, however,

To recognise powerful structural factors is not to argue that leaders are prisoners 

of the iron laws of history. It is rather to help us appreciate the magnitude of the 

challenge. If leaders in China and the United States perform no better than their 

predecessors in classical Greece, or Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, 

historians of the 21st century will cite Thucydides in explaining the catastrophe 

that follows.138

This view is consonant with the central argument of this case study: that it is the performance 

of leaders (acting in the interest of their citizens and aided by insights from Thucydides’ History) rather than any “iron law” of inevitability that will determine whether war awaits us in 

coming weeks, months, or years. As Nye puts it, “The task for international relations students 

is to build on the past but not be trapped by it.”139 Accordingly, it is necessary for the United 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

States, together with its allies, to think creatively about how the region’s future will be different 

from its past. Any attempt to contain or prevent China’s “rise”—a term portending alteration of 

geopolitical norms to accommodate the objective fact of China’s size and economic capacity but 

also embodying immense latitude in how that might occur—would be both foolish and unattainable. Whether or not it is described as a “new form of great power relations,” adjustment is 

occurring and will continue. The interaction of leadership and statecraft from both sides will 

determine the degree to which the adjustment is gradual, mutually consensual, mutually beneficial, and broadly constructive. What is needed, as Zoellick points out, is mutual commitment 

to avoiding conflict in the process: 

China and the United States each have good, self-interested reasons to pursue 

structural reforms and global rebalancing. Yet cooperation can boost mutual 

prospects and the likelihood of success. Moreover, the effectiveness of Chinese and 

U.S. reforms will boost global economic conditions and enhance the likelihood of 

structural reforms elsewhere.140

As Eikenberry suggests, the institutions associated with the U.S.-led post–World War II international order (the Washington Consensus) are capable of adjusting to new realities. They 

are not mere instruments of American power but the foundations of a global system that has 

proved beneficial for both China and the United States. They can become more inclusive and 

“less American” without undermining the prosperity or the vital security interests of either side.

For Thucydides, war occurs through human agency and as a consequence of human nature. The Greek civilization he portrays cannot imagine the elimination of war from human 

experience, and the historian himself is convinced that human nature is unchanging through 

history and does not vary appreciably from one place to another.141 The History is thus meant to 

be a portrayal of typical, characteristic behavior likely to be recognized, understood, and (as appropriate) imitated (or eschewed) by people of the future. Thucydides ventures no comment on 

how people ought to be, as his aim is to describe them as they are. His vivid presentation of war 

in his time, its origins, and its toxic effect on human values and behavior is moving and intellectually engaging, but applying it to contemporary experience is not straightforward, even though 

that is exactly what the historian invites his future readers to do.142 The History is not a policy 

manual or even a linear chronicle of events. Distilling, to say nothing of applying, Thucydidean 

“lessons” is not straightforward. As Romilly states:
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Lessons are implicit in Thucydides’ account, not explicit. Thucydides generally 

does not signal his meaning overtly, but lets it emerge from clues in the text, in 

particular from repeated words and phrases and from the nearly mathematical 

rigor of the relationships he draws between separate events. This coherence is the 

principal characteristic of Thucydides’ text, the product of [his] raison.143

It also bears noting that Thucydides’ Greek text is uniquely difficult. Gomme’s classic commentary and Simon Hornblower’s recent reboot highlight hundreds of instances in which comprehending his exact intent, much less rendering it in clear English, poses a serious challenge. 

As Jeremy Mynott puts it, “The meaning is sometimes highly compressed and, as with poetry, 

resists decompression.”144

The book’s value to contemporary strategists and policymakers is not to be found in any 

predictive formula readily applicable to future events but in the lucid exposition of human behavior (both individual and collective) in the shaping of political action—especially matters of 

war and peace. While it would be foreign to Thucydides’ intent to read the History for straightforward predictions about the future, its lessons about the way Fear, Honor, and Interest drive 

political outcomes—and, moreover, the way the seven listed “traps” can become either pitfalls 

or tools for managing and potentially mitigating crisis—are certainly relevant to the current 

security dilemma as it exists in the South and East China seas.

In addition, it must be said the rational imperative of U.S. national security policy requires 

prudential readiness for conflict with a roster of potential adversaries including China, along 

with Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Our knowledge of history and our understanding of the 

contemporary world demand nothing less. At the same time, Thucydides and common sense 

concur in demanding that a rash assumption that war is inevitable is to be resisted, not least 

because it can become self-fulfilling.

Yet the temptation to embrace a glib assumption—either that interdependent globalization 

will render war impossible or that hegemonic Chinese policies will render war inevitable—is 

sure to remain strong as evidence of China’s increasing wealth, military capacity, global influence, and even soft power continues to mount at a torrid pace. Headlines bring new examples 

on a daily basis. To cite only a few recent examples:

■ China’s Singles Day, the Alibaba Group’s annual one-day shopping festival, initiated in 

2009, registered a record $25.4 billion in sales in its November 11, 2016, iteration. This 

reflects an increase of 39 percent over the previous year and exceeds the value of the U.S. 

Black Friday ($5.03 billion) and Cyber Monday ($6.6 billion) combined.145
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

■ On May 5, 2017, China’s first domestically manufactured jetliner successfully completed its maiden voyage.146

Even in the realm of media soft power, Chinese influence is visible as never before:

■ DC Comics’ latest reboot of its superhero properties included creation not only of a 

young Chinese hero with the powers of Superman—“The New Super-Man!”—but also an 

entire “Justice League” of Chinese variants of Batman, Green Lantern, and other popular 

DC superheroes.147

■ In Marvel comics, the year-ending 2016 Spider-Man “annual” features a story in which 

the New York–based wall-crawler pays his first visit to Shanghai.

■ In November 2016, Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group paid a 

billion dollars to purchase Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globe 

Awards, American Music Awards, and Billboard Music Awards, among others.148

■ China is the world’s leading source of rare earth minerals, producing 95 percent of the 

world’s total and estimated to possess 70 percent of the world’s reserves. China will thus 

have a vital interest in global tech production, from magnets in wind turbines and electric 

car motors to smartphones and flatscreen TVs, for the foreseeable future.149

The well of similar stories is not likely to run dry soon, even though the 2017 World Happiness Report shows China stuck in 79th place (out of 155 countries) compared to the U.S. ranking 

at 14th place.150 Economists, politicians, and strategic analysts around the world will, justifiably, 

continue devoting enormous attention to political, economic, and security-oriented interactions between Beijing and Washington. While such data are useful to the strategic decisionmaker, there is no basis (at least not in the pages of Thucydides’ History) for positing that China’s rising levels of income, material comfort, economic influence, and military power by themselves 

make war inevitable. Rather, statistical metrics of the U.S.-China relationship provide a sense 

of the complexity and dynamism that leaders on both sides must take into consideration. They 

render peace neither more nor less uncertain, and war neither more nor less likely. What is certain is that the economic, political, and military interaction of the United States and China going forward will be both complex and difficult, demanding that policymakers be on top of their 

game—and that they avail themselves of analytical advantage to be gleaned from Thucydides.

Geography, History, Destiny

No matter how much geography we might learn in coming years from wars and rumors of 

wars, there is no basis for suggesting that it is a divinely decreed instrument of instruction. On 
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the contrary, U.S. experience in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Indo-Pacific region reminds us 

that war can be averted even beyond what may seem the last possible moment. 

Though largely forgotten today, the protracted crisis over the Quemoy and Matsu island 

groups during the Eisenhower administration brought the United States and China to the brink 

of nuclear war. In September 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the use of nuclear 

weapons against mainland China. Eisenhower demurred, and diplomatic efforts proceeded 

in tandem with military developments. In February 1955, British Prime Minister Winston 

Churchill warned against a U.S. nuclear strike, but a few weeks later American Secretary of 

State John Foster Dulles stated publicly that the United States was “seriously considering” exactly such a step. It seemed that alternatives to war had been exhausted and that conflict was 

truly inevitable.

But the war decision never came. The Quemoy Island group, today better known as Kinmen Island, has become an important trading point between China and Taiwan. Old defensive 

works, including tunnels excavated as shelters for Nationalist troops against mainland artillery 

and air attack, are a popular attraction for tourists from both Taiwan and the mainland. The 

underlying dispute over the status of Quemoy and Matsu (and of Taiwan itself) has not been 

solved officially, but prudent leadership on both sides, combined with judicious action by allies 

to uphold the rule of law and avoid unnecessary escalation over a sustained period, allowed the 

moment of danger to pass. It is far from inevitable that most of us will master Asian geography, 

but it is no more so that actual war will compel us to do so. 

This case study has argued that Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap metaphor falls short as 

a predictive framework in international relations and is, moreover, not properly attributable to 

Thucydides at all. The historian of the Peloponnesian War identifies Fear, Honor, and Interest 

as the prime considerations in political decisionmaking (in both peace and war), as well as decisionmaking rationales and factors that contribute to a given political decision (including the 

decision to go to war), but the war decision is always an act of will rather than a stroke of fate 

administered blindly by Tyké, Fortuna, or Providence. Humans are the agents and instigators of 

war, not merely its passive victims.151 It is not only inaccurate but also pernicious to argue, as Allison does, that war can properly be viewed in terms analogous to a thunderstorm—a dangerous 

event to be dreaded and feared but one that will inescapably result when certain atmospheric 

conditions—all beyond human control—occur. It is thus necessary to reject the notion of war 

as an inexorable phenomenon to which human beings may be “destined.”152 Rather, citizens and 

their leaders must remain mindful that their own decisions will result either in causing war or 

in preventing it. This is no less true today in the South China Sea—or in the Congo, Iraq, Libya, 
39

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

Mali, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, or Yemen—than in the Mediterranean world of the 

5th century BCE. 

Thucydides provides two different explanations of the importance of the war that dominated his life and shattered the brief Golden Age of classical Greece. In 1.1 he writes that he 

believed at the outset that it would be “a great war, and more worthy of relation [that is, ‘of being 

talked about’ (axiologōtaton/ὶ ἀξιολογώτατον)] than any that had preceded it” due to the impressive size and character of its motion, energy, and daring. In 1.23, however, he indicates that 

the Peloponnesian War was unsurpassed, eclipsing the Persian wars, because of the great sufferings (pathēmata/παθήματα) that it brought to so many people over so long a time (27 years):

Never had so many cities been taken and laid desolate (the old inhabitants 

sometimes being removed to make room for others); never was there so much 

banishing and bloodshedding, now on the field of battle, now in political strife. 

It is such human costs that must be kept uppermost in mind through the coming years 

of evolving bilateral relations between the United States and China. Just as the Peloponnesian 

War did not occur as the preordained consequence of a destiny-shaping Thucydides Trap, war 

between rising and settled powers153 in our own time is not inevitable. Indeed, expectations of 

imminent conflict may have diminished over the 6 years since the Thucydides Trap metaphor 

entered the public eye.154

War remains possible, nonetheless, and leaders on both sides must act wisely, mindful 

of their own national interests and the “traps” always latent in great power relations, to avoid 

an unnecessary and unwanted conflict that would bring suffering and bloodshed far beyond 

anything Thucydides ever imagined. As Eikenberry says, success will be impossible if leaders 

in Washington and Beijing indiscriminately cast China and the United States as tragic actors 

condemned to reenact the Peloponnesian War. In this endeavor, American and Chinese leaders 

might take counsel from the Spartan envoys who treated for peace after the unexpected Athenian victory at Pylos:

If great enmities are ever to be really settled, we think it will be, not by the system 

of revenge and military success, and by forcing an opponent to swear to a treaty 

to his disadvantage; but when the more fortunate combatant waives his privileges 

and, guided by gentler feelings, conquers his rival in generosity and accords 

peace on more moderate conditions than expected. . . . And men more often act 
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in this manner toward their greatest enemies than where the quarrel is of less 

importance.155

Graham Allison has declared tirelessly over the past 6 years that Washington and Beijing 

“are on a collision course for war.”156 If they are, the factors that may drive the two nations toward conflict do not stem from a normative “dynamic” of interaction between “rising” and “ruling” powers discerned by Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. As with the Spartans 

and Athenians twenty-five centuries ago, future relations between China and the United States 

will be shaped by the idiosyncratic actions and decisions of their leaders, who will be spurred by 

domestic opinion and guided by the perceived requirements of Fear (national security), Honor 

(national status and societal values), and Interest (prosperity and economic advantage). Those 

leaders can nevertheless find beneficial counsel in the pages of the History, as noted above. 

As it has since the flashpoints of the 1950s, and even more so since China’s economic 

transformation in the 1980s, successful management of the bilateral relationship will demand 

continual attention at the highest levels of leadership. As Allison points out, it will also demand 

“a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations 

that reestablished U.S.-China relations in the 1970s.”157 Perhaps reading Thucydides together 

can help Americans and Chinese begin to build such understanding, including progress toward 

a mutually agreed “new form of great power relations” that assures prosperity and security for 

both sides and stability for the region. While U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region necessitate 

prudent readiness for the worst, it is possible that that new model could take the form of mutually beneficial, positive-sum engagement.

Thucydides may well be expressing his own view when he has Corinthian envoys declare 

that “There is . . . no advantage in reflections on the past further than may be of service to the 

present.”158 If reading Thucydides’ dense and provocative History can reinforce our confidence 

that war is never inevitable—that its outbreak is always a consequence of human intellect and 

action, and that there are qualities of governance and citizenship that can help us avoid it—then 

the advantage will indeed be great. 
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

Appendix

2015 Version: Belfer Center Thucydides’s Trap Case File
42 

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2017 Version: Belfer Center Thucydides’s Trap Case File

Source: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University.
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

Notes

1 Except where otherwise stated, all quotations from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian 

War cited in this case study are drawn from Thuycidides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive 

Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Free Press, 

1996), hereafter, History. See Graham Allison et al., Thucydides Trap Forum, transcript, Belfer Center for 

Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, March 22, 2017, available at <www.belfercenter.

org/sites/default/files/files/publication/Thucydides%27s%20Trap%20Forum%20Transcript%20-%20

March%2022%2C%202017.pdf>. (Allison’s reference comes from Thuc. 1.23.6.). English philosopher 

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who found in Thucydides what he deemed a useful framework for understanding the English Civil Wars (1639–1651) of his own time, was the first to translate the History directly from Greek into English in 1628. See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Thomas 

Hobbes (London: Bohn, 1843).

2 The state’s decision to go to war, or not, is of course a matter of the utmost importance to every 

citizen, although not all governing systems allow the citizen meaningful scope to influence that decision, or to hold government decisionmakers accountable for its consequences. The Sovereign People of 

classical Athens, the world’s first direct democracy, were especially close to the national decisionmaking 

process. Male citizens 20 years of age or older debated options in the Ecclesia (ἐκκλησία), or Assembly, 

and if they decided by simple majority vote to commit the state to war, the same men returned the next 

day with armor and weapons ready to fight. 

3 Garson O’Toole, “War Is God’s Way of Teaching Us Geography,” QuoteInvestigator.com, available at <http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/19/geography/>. “Garson O’Toole,” pseudonym of the online Quote Investigator, believes this witticism (which over many years has been erroneously attributed 

to Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain) may be more than a century old. Sadly, some important geographical 

lessons imparted by war (or by the prospect of war) seem perishable, and thus require periodic renewal.

4 Robert B. Norris, “Quemoy and Matsu: A Historical Footnote Revisited,” AmericanDiplomacy.

org, November 2010, available at <www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2010/0912/comm/norris_quemoymatsu.html>.

5 Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 

36. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reportedly recommended a nuclear strike against China during the first crisis, 

as Chinese diplomats reportedly recalled, and complained in expressing their own veiled nuclear threats, 

in conjunction with the third. 

6 Kim Iskyan, “China’s Middle Class Is Exploding,” Business Insider, August 27, 2016, available 

at <www.businessinsider.com/chinas-middle-class-is-exploding-2016-8>. Overall bilateral trade volume 

declined slightly in 2016 and 2017, as did the U.S. trade deficit with China ($346 billion for 2016); Graham 

Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 

Harcourt, 2017). In Destined for War, Allison amply highlights many such statistical metrics of China’s 

rapid economic rise. He cites the prophetic pronouncements of Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015)—Singapore’s 

first Prime Minister—who might be compared to Pericles in both length of service and magnitude of the 

positive transformation he led for his country, in characterizing China as “the biggest player in the history of the world.” It is notable, in this regard, that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) visited 
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Singapore for widely celebrated talks with Lee Kuan Yew just 2 months before China’s historic “opening” 

to the global economy in January 1979.

7 See U.S. Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with China,” available at <www.census.gov/foreigntrade/balance/c5700.html>. Between 1988 and 2008, middle class income grew by 70 percent in China, 

compared to only 4 percent in the United States. Economists speculate endlessly about how long China’s 

unprecedented growth can continue and whether the country can avoid social fissures and domestic 

instability from income inequality, environmental degradation, demands for political pluralism, or other 

factors. The overarching reality is clear: Export-led growth has led China to the point of “challenging” the 

United States in certain statistical metrics traditionally associated with national power, a concept resistant 

to precise evaluation.

8 See appendix. Because Allison and others routinely cite China’s provocative policies and practices 

in the South and East China seas in conjunction with the Thucydides Trap concept, this snapshot of the issue is included to provide context and perspective. Readers interested in the legal and historical origins of 

the conflicting claims of China and other states in the region can consult the excellent Department of State 

Limits in the Seas volumes. Also, Eleanor Freund’s “Practical Guide,” published by Harvard’s Belfer Center, 

offers detailed information in a uniquely user-friendly format. Finally, the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies) provides an indispensable online 

window on regional trends unfolding over such vast expanses of ocean that up-to-date facts and analytical coherence are often difficult to obtain. See Department of State, Limits in the Seas, 6 vols. (Washington, DC: Department of State [Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs]); 

See also Eleanor Freund, Freedom of Navigation in the South China Sea: A Practical Guide: Special Report 

(Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center, June 2017), available at <www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/

publication/SCS%20Report%20-%20web.pdf>; and “China’s Continuing Reclamation in the Paracels,” Asia 

Maritime Transparency Initiative, Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 9, 2017, available at 

<https://amti.csis.org/paracels-beijings-other-buildup/>. It is beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate the 

conflicting claims and operational measures undertaken by the rival claimants, beyond advocating a strictly 

fact-based approach both to describing such claims and to adducing comments from Thucydides’ History

that are potentially relevant to those claims and to the broader U.S.-China relationship. That said, while 

China has been aggressive in asserting its maritime claims, particularly since 2014, it is useful to keep in 

view countervailing arguments like those of Taiwan-based analyst Michael Turton. He sees Beijing’s contention that its claims date back to time literally immemorial as a powerful, little-remarked and utterly spurious 

assertion of Chinese soft power: “Outsiders view [China] as exotic and opaque, giving undeserved weight 

to its territorial claims on its neighbors, all 20th century re-interpretations. . . . China makes its spurious 

claims reinforce each other [through] its creation of a faux historical continuity which can then be quotemined and re-interpreted for support for China’s modern and wholly anachronistic expansionist territorial 

claims.” See Michael A. Turton, “Constructing China’s Claims to the Senkaku,” November 6, 2013, available 

at <https://thediplomat.com/2013/11/constructing-chinas-claims-to-the-senkaku/>.

9 “China’s Continuing Reclamation in the Paracels.”

10 Ralph Jennings, “China Calmed Asian Maritime Dispute in 2017 Without Ceding Sovereignty,” 

VOANews.com, December 11, 2017, available at <www.voanews.com/a/south-china-sea-disputes-calming-down/4158167.html>.
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Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

11 David E. Sanger, “Superpower and Upstart: Sometimes It Ends Well,” New York Times, January 

22, 2011, available at <www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/weekinreview/23sanger.html>.

12 The G-2 concept, suggested early in the Obama administration by American economist C. 

Fred Bergsten and subsequently endorsed with varying emphasis by former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, and former World Bank president and former 

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, among others, appeared to elicit little enthusiasm from 

officials of either China or the United States. 

13 Ben Schott, “The Thucydides Trap,” New York Times, January 31, 2011, available at <http://

schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-thucydides-trap/?_r=0>.

14 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History

(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), chap. 1, available at <http://165.193.140.14/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205778747.pdf>. Nye is a long-time Thucydides enthusiast and knows the 

History well. He included a masterful short summary of Thucydides’ analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian War in his 1993 book Understanding International Conflicts and notes in his introduction: “Some 

aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides; there is a certain logic of hostility, 

a dilemma about security that goes with interstate politics. Alliances, balances of power, and choices in 

policy between war and compromise have remained similar over the millennia.”

15 Munir Akram, “Rising Dragon, Wounded Eagle,” Dawn (Pakistan), April 16, 2016, available at 

<www.dawn.com/news/1327278/rising-dragon-wounded-eagle>.

16 Allison, Destined for War. In Destined for War, the 10th of Allison’s “Twelve Clues for Peace” acknowledges as much: “Thick economic interdependence raises the cost—and thus lowers the likelihood—

of war.” Yet the book, like Allison’s many published articles and recorded interviews on the Thucydides 

Trap concept over recent years, presents such positive observations within the context of an overarching 

view that war is, as the title declares, destined.

17 Karl Eikenberry, “Thucydides Trap,” The United States Studies Centre at the University of 

Sydney, August 1, 2014, available at <www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/thucydides-trap>.

18 John Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” lecture, University of Chicago, December 18, 

2013, video, available at <www.youtube.com/watch?v= 0DMn4PmiDeQ>.

19 Graham Allison, “Thucydides’s Trap Has Been Sprung in the Pacific,” Financial Times, August 

21, 2012, available at <www.ft.com/content/5d695b5a-ead3-11e1-984b-00144feab49a>.

20 Graham Allison, “Obama and Xi Must Think Broadly to Avoid a Classic Trap,” New York 

Times, June 6, 2013, available at <www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/Obama-and-Xi-must-thinkbroadly-to-avoid-a-classic-trap.html>. The appendix shows the Belfer Center’s Case File, which purports 

to provide a historical foundation to the notion of a Thucydides Trap as a normative pattern in the encounter of “rising” and “ruling” powers during the past five centuries of European history. 

21 Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015, available at <www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-stateschina-war-thucydides-trap/406756/>.

22 Sharon Wilke, “Will the U.S. and China Collide in the 21st Century?” Belfer Center Newsletter, 

Spring 2015, available at <www.belfercenter.org/publication/will-us-and-china-collide-21st-century>. The 

term sorpasso (Italian for “overtaking”) has languished long on the sidelines of political science waiting to 
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be put back into the game in a memorable way. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was invoked in reference 

to the Italian Communist Party’s (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to overtake the Christian Democrats as 

Italy’s largest political party. In the 1990s, Spain’s Communist Party adopted the term as it nearly (but not 

quite) overtook the Socialist Workers Party as the country’s leading party of the left. In 1987, economists 

announced (to little fanfare) that Italy had achieved sorpasso by overtaking Britain as the world’s fifth largest economy in nominal GDP terms. Britain regained its former status in 1997, only to be surpassed again 

by Italy in 2009, which prompted the Italian ambassador in London to hail a secondo sorpasso. Each time, 

the statistical event had no measurable impact on life in the real world. In 2010, China’s GDP surpassed 

Japan’s to rank behind only the United States. This sorpasso, similarly, brought no visible change to bilateral 

relations or the power dynamic within the Indo-Pacific region. Renowned scholar of strategy and international relations Niall Ferguson became the first to apply the term to Allison’s Thucydides Trap metaphor in 

a March 22, 2017, Harvard roundtable event to promote the impending publication of Destined for War. 

At least in a small way, this background suggests that measuring how (and whether) a moment of sorpasso

actually matters in relations among states may be more difficult than calculating the statistical metric(s) 

that confirms its existence.

23 Allison, “Thucydides’s Trap Has Been Sprung in the Pacific.”

24 Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?”

25 Ibid. Allison clearly intends the term Thucydidean proportions to convey a sense of great magnitude, although the term has no visible foundation in Thucydides’ History. At about the same time, 

Harvard’s Belfer Center Web site added a brief account of Allison’s elegantly simple methodology for 

selecting the 16 historical vignettes in his Case File. Taking a “rapid shift in a regional balance of power 

between a major ruling power and a rival that could displace it” as the independent variable, and “war” 

as the dependent variable, Allison and his students reviewed European conflicts since 1500 for instances 

that appear to involve a flashpoint between ruling and ruled. 

26 Ibid.

27 See “A Conversation with General Martin Dempsey,” Carnegie Endowment for International 

Peace, Washington, DC, May 2, 2012; and Martin E. Dempsey, “Remarks and Q&A,” Joint Warfighting 

Conference & Exposition, Virginia Beach, VA, May 16, 2012.

28 Quoted by Dingding Chen, “Defining a ‘New Type of Major Power Relations,’” The Diplomat, 

November 8, 2014, available at <http://thediplomat.com/2014/11/defining-a-new-type-of-major-powerrelations/>.

29 Ibid.

30 Christopher Mackie, “Malcolm Turnbull, and Thucydides, and All That,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 17, 2015. 

31 See Robert B. Zoellick, “U.S., China and Thucydides: How Can Washington and Beijing Avoid 

Typical Patterns of Distrust and Fear?” The National Interest, July/August 2013, available at <http://nationalinterest.org/article/us-china-thucydides-8642>. The fact that both U.S. and Chinese officials over 

the past 6 years have made a point of speaking to the Thucydides Trap concept may reflect an important 

factor that will serve to diminish the likelihood of conflict: that the Chinese leadership is (a) attuned to 

influential trends in American academic and political discourse and (b) inclined to enter that discourse 

with the aim of lowering bilateral tension. 
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32 Zhang Feng et al., “Thucydides Trap Not Etched in Stone,” China Daily, August 20, 2015, 

available at <www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2015-08/20/content_21655686.htm>. Feng suggests Xuncius Breakthrough as an alternative to the phrase Thucydides Trap. Chinese philosopher Xuncius (313–238 

BCE) declared that a set of well-planned manners or actions, as opposed to selfish designs, can help avoid 

conflicts and facilitate cooperation. Hence, Xuncius’s theory can lead China and the United States toward 

sustainable cooperation.

33 See Renée Jeffery, “Evaluating the ‘China Threat’: Power Transition Theory, the Successor-State 

Image, and the Dangers of Historical Analogies,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 63, no. 2 (June 

2009), 309–324, available at <www.researchgate.net/publication/44190679_Evaluating_the_%27China_

threat%27_power_transition_theory_the_successor-state_image_and_the_dangers_of_historical_analogies>. Allison has made no published claim that he is the first analyst to suggest that the rise of a new 

power can lead to war with the power it appears destined to challenge or supplant. At the same time, it 

is notable that Allison’s published work on the Thucydides Trap concept makes no reference whatsoever 

to A.F.K. Organski’s remarkable effort to devise a quantitative model to measure the impact—including 

war risk—of a shift in the concentration of political power either on a regional or a global basis. Broadly 

speaking, the least that can be said is that Organski and Allison examine the same historical phenomenon from perspectives that are broadly synoptic. The fact that Organski’s work is included, without 

elaboration, in a list of “other sources” in the Belfer Center’s “Thucydides Project” Web site appears to 

confirm that Allison’s failure to acknowledge an important predecessor is not a mere oversight. See A.F.K. 

Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 206. Also see 

“How Is Allison’s and Coker’s Work on the ‘Thucydides Trap’ Not Plagiarism?” Political Science Rumors, 

October 21, 2015, available at <www.poliscirumors.com/topic/how-is-allisons-and-cokers-work-on-thethucydides-trap-not-plagiarism>. Postings in 2015 by purported political science graduate students on 

the Political Science Rumors blog went further, suggesting that Allison is guilty of plagiarism.

34 Alek Chance, “Is Thucydides Helpful in Explaining Sino-U.S. Relations?” The Diplomat, May 

20, 2015, available at <https://thediplomat.com/2015/05/is-thucydides-helpful-in-explaining-sino-usrelations/>.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Liz Sawyer, “Translating the Untranslatable,” review of The War of the Peloponnesians and the 

Athenians, by Thucydides, ed. and trans. Jeremy Mynott, The Oxonian Review 22, no. 6 (July 8, 2013), 

available at <www.oxonianreview.org/wp/translating-the-untranslatable/>. Translating the untranslatable is the resonant phrase of Thomas Hobbes’s 1628 text, the first translation of Thucydides’ complete 

History directly from Greek into English. Sawyer notes that since Hobbes, there have been 11 full translations of the History, as well as numerous revisions of translations and innumerable translations of popular 

excerpts such as “Pericles’ Funeral Oration” and the “Melian Dialogue.” 

38Thuc. 1.22.4.

39 Seth N. Jaffe, “Thucydides on the Outbreak of War,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2012, 

6–7, available at <http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.georgetown.thesis>, underscores this point: 

“The History can be an ‘everlasting possession’ only if it truly portrays man, only if it reveals that which is 

typical of him. Thucydides asserts the timelessness of his work on the ground that the future will resemble 
48 

Misenheimer

the past, because the men of the future will resemble those of the past. History as a singular chain of events 

will not repeat itself, but the way Thucydides depicts singular events is nonetheless intended to bring out 

what is universal or representative about them.”

40 Thuc. 1.22.2–1.22.3.

41 The early Warring States Period roughly coincides with Thucydides’ lifetime, approximately 

460 to 400 BCE. While our biographical knowledge of Thucydides is limited to the few hints provided in 

the History itself, there is no doubt that he existed. Sun Tzu, in contrast, may be a composite, and the Art 

of War attributed to him may be a compilation from multiple sources.

42 Thuc. 2.35–2.46.

43 Thuc. 5.84–5.111.

44 Thuc. 3.70 and 2.47.3–2.54.5.

45 Thuc. 1.22.4.

46 Jaffe, 19. 

47 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 

1.1253a.20. 

48 Thuc. 1.24.7, 1.32, 1.56, 1.68, 1.120, and 1.140.

49 This aspect of the History appears relevant to recent and ongoing discussion within the United 

States about the prosecution of current wars and the contemplation of possible future ones. In 2002 and 

early 2003, advocates of the Iraq war selectively quoted Pericles’ unbending refusal to alter course or 

make concessions for peace (for example, 1.144.3), but that Athenian policy failed disastrously in the end. 

Moreover, an attentive reading of the History as a whole shows that war, while likely necessary because of 

human nature, is a “hard master.” It may yield a peace on better terms than those which preceded the war, 

but the costs will be high and the prospects far from certain.

50 See Thuc. 1.66.

51 Thucydides highlights many cases in which the citizens of a polis must decide whether or not 

to go to war. In many of the instances listed here, strong emotions and narrow, short-term agendas get in 

the way of rational decisionmaking keyed to a dispassionate survey of known facts and available options.

Thuc. Citation Decision

1.24.7 Corcyraeans must decide whether to settle their disagreement with Epidamnus 

or enter a war virtually certain to escalate to include Corinth and perhaps other 

city-states

1.32 Athenians must decide whether to ally with Corcyra in its war with Corinth

1.56 Potidaeans must decide whether to join neighboring poleis in revolt against Athens

1.68 Spartans, after conferring with Corinthians and other allies, must decide to declare war on Athens

1.120 Allies of Sparta must vote on whether to support the Spartan declaration of war 

on Athens

1.140 Athenians must decide whether to offer terms to Sparta or to enter a state of war
49

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

2.2 Plataeans must decide whether to resist a surprise incursion by Theban forces

2.72 Plataeans must decide whether to submit to a Spartan ultimatum to surrender 

their city, or to remain allies of Athens and thus enemies of Sparta

3.9 Spartans and their allies must decide whether to send forces in support of Mytilene’s revolt from Athens

4.59 Sicilians must decide whether to enter an island-wide truce (advocated by Syracuse) and unite in opposition to the Athenian invasion, or continue current local 

wars

4.85 Acanthians must decide whether to join Brasidas in opposing Athens 

4.91 Boeotians must decide whether to pursue and attack the Athenian army or to allow the Athenians to depart their territory without engagement

4.105.1 Amphipolitans must decide whether to admit the Spartan general Brasidas and 

his besieging army—and thereby revolt from Athens—or remain an ally of Athens 

and resist him

5.27 Argives must decide whether to go to war with Sparta, a conflict many in Argos 

regard as “inevitable” because the Peace of Nicias gives Sparta respite from war 

with Athens

5.29 Mantineans must decide whether to join the Argive alliance with Athens against 

Sparta

5.84 Melians must decide whether to submit to an Athenian ultimatum or resist militarily

6.1 Athenians must decide whether to invade distant Syracuse

6.76 Camarinaeans must decide whether to remain in alliance with Syracuse or ally 

with Athens in war against Syracuse

52 Thuc. 6.10.5.

53 Thuc. 6.18.3. The Athenians at this point exemplify the Chinese proverb: “He who rides 

the tiger is afraid to dismount.” Alcibiades’ argument seems to echo Pericles’ own warning that “You 

cannot decline the burden of empire and still expect to share its honors,” (2.63.1) although Pericles 

also issues a strong admonition against strategic overstretch: I have many other reasons to hope for 

a favorable outcome [in the war] if you can consent not to combine schemes of fresh conquest with 

the conduct of the war, and will abstain from willfully involving yourselves in other dangers; indeed, I 

am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices (1.144.1). This remark exemplifies a 

common aspect of the speeches in the History: The speaker’s remarks prefigure a subsequent outcome 

known to the historian (who composed some and edited at least part (perhaps all) of the History after 

the end of the war in 404). The magnitude of the loss suffered in Sicily as a direct consequence of the 

Athenians’ failure to heed this warning makes it likely that this statement by Pericles also reflects the 

opinion of Thucydides himself.

54 Thuc. 6.88.10 and 7.18.1.
50 

Misenheimer

55 Jacqueline de Romilly, The Mind of Thucydides, ed. Hunter R. Rawlings III, trans. Elizabeth 

Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 164. This line of analysis is heavily indebted to Romilly, whose 1956 work Histoire et raison chez Thucydide transformed Thucydidean studies through her compelling recognition of the organizing intelligence (raison) of the historian at work 

behind the events of the History, shaping the reader’s perception with precision and purpose. While he 

creates the illusion of providing vetted, objective facts and allowing the reader to decide how to interpret 

them, Thucydides succeeds—through the selection of details both included and omitted—the impact of 

the 44 emotionally freighted (and rhetorically masterful) speeches in guiding the reader’s judgment. See

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 

As Hammond recounts, prior to Romilly, and the additional impetus of W.R. Connor’s Thucydides (1984), 

scholarly attention focused heavily on the “Thucydidean Question”: When did the historian form his views 

on war and human nature? Was it early in the war, as a young man in exile, or after his return to Athens at 

war’s end, as an old man scarred by decades of exile and the Spartan subjugation of his homeland? Which 

parts of the text reflect the one or the other? Many years of meticulous scouring of the text for scholia, 

otiosa, emendations, and clues that a passage is “early” or “late” (in parallel with the emergence of Biblical 

hermeneutics from the beginning of the 19th century) yielded a detailed survey of the “strata of composition” and revealed indications of incompleteness in the History. From the mid-20th century, scholarly 

emphasis shifted to examination of the text as a whole, with general acceptance of the expedient assumption that, gaps and imperfections notwithstanding, “it is the text which Thucydides intended his readers 

to have.” Of course neither the “old school” of textual analysis nor post-Romilly Thucydidean scholarship 

would attempt to seek studies but would seize on a single, brief passage as the full and final articulation of 

Thucydides’ insight into human nature, the human condition, and the reality of war. However, if the author of this case study were compelled to nominate one passage as the essence of Thucydides’ insight into 

human nature, the human condition, and the reality of war, it would be his poignant summation of the 

catastrophic Athenian invasion of Syracuse, a fellow democracy 800 miles distant by sea: “Few out of many 

returned home” (ὀλίγοι ἀπὸ πολλῶν ἐπ ̓ οἴκου ἀπενόστησαν) (Thuc. 7.87.6). 

56 Thuc. 1.23.6.

57 Gomme, in his classic Commentary on the History, provides a simple, incisive observation 

regarding the historian’s stated goal: “This object has not been achieved.” As in the case of Thucydides’ 

clinically detailed account of the plague at Athens (which he intended to help future generations [2.48.3]), 

we have not recognized or identified the disease and thus have failed to reap the benefit he intended. See 

Arnold Wycombe Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford, UK: Oxford University 

Press, 1945).

58 Thuc. 1.139.1–2.

59 G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 

Press, 1972).

60Thuc. 1.21.1.

61 Nevertheless, Book 1 includes numerous instances in which Thucydides’ account of earlier 

events explicitly agrees with Herodotus, who was about 13 years his elder. Criticism of another historian—Hellanicus of Mytilene (20–25 years older than Thucydides), who is mentioned by name at 1.97.2—

may also be intended.
51

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

62 The 11 extant plays of Aristophanes shape our understanding of Old Comedy as a depiction 

of the life of the polis, with a corresponding focus on issues of concern to the city and its citizens. His 

four “peace plays”—The Acharnians (425 BCE), Peace (421), Lysistrata (411), and The Frogs (405)— focus 

directly on the Peloponnesian War, which was at its height just as Aristophanes was enjoying his greatest 

success as a playwright. In the Acharnians, Dikaiopolis, an Everyman protagonist, attributes the war to 

Pericles’ support for the Megarian Decree(s), traditionally regarded as sanctions imposed on Megarian 

citizens and/or the city of Megara supposedly because Megarians had abducted two prostitutes from the 

brothel of Aspasia in retaliation for the abduction of a prostitute from Megara. Thus, “for three whores 

Greece is set ablaze.” Pericles had died in 429, two years prior to Aristophanes’ first stage production and, 

by war’s end in 404, would have seemed a remote historical figure to many Athenians. Thus, even though 

Dikaiopolis’ account of the war’s cause is certainly intended as a ribald joke, many (though not all) scholars have traditionally seen Thucydides’ History in part as an effort to set the record straight and defend 

the Periclean legacy against such diminishing revisionism. 

63 This is Richard Crawley’s translation of 1.23.4–6 as it appears in the Landmark edition. Allison 

has used variant translations of the key sentence (1.23.6) over the years: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm that this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable”; see Graham Allison et al., “Avoiding 

Thucydides’s Trap: Managing the Rise of China,” Belfer Center Conference, March 23, 2017; and “It was 

the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”; see Destined for War, 

xiv. Neither corresponds precisely with any of the major published English translations, but both are close 

to Crawley and substantially sound. See Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide 

to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Free Press, 2008).

64 See John R. Wilson, review of Ananke in Thucydides, by Martin Ostwald, Phoenix 45, no. 4 

(Winter 1991).

65 Jaffe, 6–7; and Antony Andrewes, “Thucydides on the Causes of the War,” The Classical Quarterly 9, no. 2 (November 1959), 223–239. Scholars over time have tended toward the view that 1.23.6, an 

expression of Thucydides’ personal view (ήγουμαι), is a late (perhaps, postwar) insertion into a text mostly 

written much (perhaps, decades) earlier. Andrewes describes it as the product of a very different mood, 

and years of “cool reflection on the implications of imperial policy.” Andrewes also cited that Schwartz 

and others have argued, furthermore, that the historian late in life reversed his opinion on this key point: 

“Having once thought that the determining factor was Athens’ pressure upon Sparta’s allies, especially 

on Corinth, and that Sparta herself was reluctant to fight, then he turned over to the view that the true 

cause was rather Sparta’s fundamental hostility to Athens.” In 44.2, Thucydides makes clear that even 

back in Athens a segment of public opinion held war to be inevitable—“it began now to be felt that the 

Peloponnesian War was only a question of time”—but there is no explanation for this remark, which may 

be another late assertion.

66 The fact that the truest (alethestate) cause of the war would be least spoken of reflects more a 

convention of political rhetoric throughout the History than revelation of any effort to conceal or falsify 

the reasons for the war. In fact, Thucydides regarded confusion, distortion, and deception in the debate 

over whether to enter a war to be par for the course, both because common people could not easily grasp 

some of the subtle, underlying forces at play and because elite participants in the debate often had hidden agendas and intentionally did not reveal their true motives. Contemporary Americans need look 
52 

Misenheimer

no further than our own national debate in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to confirm that this 

human proclivity is alive and well. Some American decisionmakers were taken in, as were the Athenians, 

by reports from would-be allies that proved “as attractive as [they were] untrue” (6.8.2). In Thucydides’ 

History, exactly the same practice is evident in the Athenian discussion of whether to invade Sicily during 

the 7-year hiatus in the war with Sparta. While advocates of the audacious enterprise publicly espouse 

the “specious design of aiding their kindred and other allies in the island,” their actual goal (Thucydides 

employs the same term—alethestate prophasis—used in his Book 1 discussion of the causes of the Peloponnesian War) is to conquer the entire island and thus extend their Aegean empire into the central 

Mediterranean (6.6.1). Of course, Greek poleis commonly engage in outright deception as well (for example, 1.26 and 1.90.3).

67 Giovanni Parmeggiani, ed., Between Thucydides and Polybius: The Golden Age of Greek Historiography (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2014), 116.

68 Ibid., 118. See also Tim Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 

69 Sidney Bradshaw Fay, The Origins of the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 1. The 

phrase is adapted from the work of historian Sidney Bradshaw Fay, who opens his classic study of World 

War I with a reference to the Peloponnesian War:

The Greek historian Thucydides, in his history of that catastrophe to ancient civilization 

when Spartan militarism triumphed over Athenian democracy, makes the distinction 

between the more remote or underlying, and the immediate, causes of war. It is the 

distinction between the gradual accumulation of inflammable material which has been 

heaped up through a long period of years and the final spark which starts the conflagration. 

The distinction is a good one. It is equally applicable to the World War.

Of course, Fay’s distinction between formal and efficient causes is more explicit (and 

less muddled) than that of Thucydides, whose History predates Aristotle’s crystallization 

of the Four Causes (in Physics II.3 and Metaphysics V.2) by about half a century. Aristotle 

adopted the grammatically neuter form, aition, for his philosophical purpose.

70 In this instance, however, the human hand of the historian, rather than the scientific detachment he wished to convey on this point, is all too evident. His summation of the Spartan vote for war in 

1.88 indicates that the Spartans were explicitly focused on (and not merely influenced internally by) the 

prophasis rather than the aitiai: “The Spartans voted that the treaty had been broken, and that war must be 

declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared 

the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.” Moreover, 

the only speech of the allies we are provided—that of the Corinthians—devotes only a single sentence 

(1.68.4) to the aitiai, otherwise focusing almost entirely on the dangers posed by Athens’ imperialist 

expansion. As Andrewes notes, this is evidence of editing and/or a changing viewpoint by the historian 

during the decades of his project.
53

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

71 Parmeggiani, 120. He refers to this broad conceptual knowledge and exacting background 

study as “the theoretical backbone of [Thucydides’] political science.” 

72 Thuc. 2.59.

73 Thuc. 6.8.2.

74 Thuc. 1.75.3, 1.76.2, and 1.123.1. The interplay of these three elemental factors unfailingly 

leads every state to judge its own policies and actions as just, whether its national command authority 

opts to go to war. Thucydides refers to them repeatedly throughout the History. For example, the Corinthian envoys touch upon all three (1.120.2, 1.122.2, and 1.123.1) in their rather strident effort to persuade 

Sparta and its other allies to declare war on Athens. It is within the overarching context of Fear, Honor, 

and (self-)Interest that a state’s national decisionmaking process examines the more visible but less significant factors often cited in decisions of whether to go to war (for example, military capacity, economic 

power, quality of leadership, depth of patriotism (1.1.74), and the important “traps” discussed below.

75 H.R. McMaster, “The Pipe Dream of Easy War,” New York Times, July 20, 2013, available at 

<www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/the-pipe-dream-of-easy-war.html>.

76 James R. Holmes, “Thucydides, Japan and America,” The Diplomat, November 27, 2012, available at <https://thediplomat.com/2012/11/thucydides-japan-and-america/>.

77 Thuc. 1.75.3, 1.76.2, and 1.123.1.

78 Thuc. 1.1.74.

79 Leon Whyte, “The Real Thucydides’ Trap,” The Diplomat, May 6, 2015, available at <https://

thediplomat.com/2015/05/the-real-thucydides-trap/>.

80 Thuc. 1.68–71. Thucydides later validates the main points in 4.55.2 and 8.96.4.

81 Like the Thebans in their fixation on local rival Plataea, the Corinthians view the affair of Epidamnus and Corcyra as a local matter and for that reason fail to grasp fully the broader context of events 

leading up to the Peloponnesian War.

82 Yan Xuetong, “Alliances Can Prevent Greater Conflicts between China, U.S.,” Global Times, 

March 31, 2016, available at <www.globaltimes.cn/content/ 976854.shtml>. 

83 Shannon Tiezzi, “Chinese Media: Maybe It’s Time the U.S. Heeded Deng Xiaoping’s Advice,” 

The Diplomat, April 2, 2015, available at <http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/chinese-media-maybe-itstime-the-us-heeded-deng-xiaopings-advice/>.

84 See Jaffe, 4.

85 Thucydides, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, ed. and trans. Jeremy Mynott 

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

86 Thuc. 1.2.4 and 1.18.

87 Thuc. 3.82.2.

88 In public remarks on March 18, 2014, stressing the need for government to retain credibility with the citizenry, Xi Jinping used a new term—the Tacitus Trap—that in China is now regarded in 

parallel with the Thucydides Trap. The Tacitus Trap, as reported in Chinese media over recent years, 

warns leaders against statements or actions that could cause the government to lose credibility with the 

citizenry. Variant formulations have appeared: “Neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome.” “When a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth 

or a lie, to do good or bad will be considered a lie or to do bad.” The concept is familiar from Marxist 
54 

Misenheimer

theory, but also echoes a line from Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56–117 CE): “When a 

ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him.” See Tacitus, Complete 

Works of Tacitus, ed. Alfred John Church et al. (New York: Random House, 1873, reprinted 1942, ed. for 

Perseus Catalog), book 1, chapter 7. The term now has an officially sanctioned form (塔西佗陷阱) and 

has gained currency in academic discourse and been incorporated in the Civil Service Test. The original 

source of the Tacitus Trap concept is uncertain (some credit Xi Jinping himself), but in China it is seen as 

a long-established doctrine presumed to be well-known in the West. See also Neville Morley, “Alliterative 

Ancients’ Aphorisms,” Sphinx, September 4, 2017, available at <https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/09/04/

assorted-alliterative-ancients-aphorisms/>. Morley has usefully gathered data on this topic, and credits 

Gerald Krieghofer with first identifying the appropriate line from Tacitus.

89 Thuc. 1.83.2. See also, 1.1.83, 1.11.2, 1.19, 1.142, 1.4, and 1.7.

90 Thuc. 6.31.3 and 7.28.4.

91 Chas Freeman, “Avoiding the ‘Thucydides Trap’ in the Indo-Pacific,” Chasfreeman.net, available at <http://chasfreeman.net/avoiding-the-thucydides-trap-in-the-indo-pacific/>.

92 Thuc. 3.41. See also Gerald Mara, “Thucydides and Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought, ed. Stephen G. Salkever (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 98. 

93 Thuc. 4.81.1–3, 4.105.1–2, 4.107.3, 4.108.2–3, etc.

94 The two also provide an exceptional study of opposing rhetorical techniques, with craft and 

technique augmenting the persuasive power of (and at other times merely concealing) the genuinely held 

views of each.

95 Thuc. 6.36, 6.9–14, and 6.16–18.

96 John H. Finley, Jr., Three Essays on Thucydides (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

1967), xi. The distinguished Harvard scholar John Finley was a leading voice among classicists who believe that “the topographical and other detail of the sixth and seventh books makes as certain as such 

things can be that Thucydides visited Syracuse, necessarily after 413.”

97 The characterization of the great Spartan general Gylippus just before leading Syracusan and 

allied forces into the decisive battle that would doom Athens to defeat in the Peloponnesian War and 

extinguish Athenian imperial power (7.66.2).

98 Numbers are often difficult to pin down, but Thucydides states that “not less than forty thousand” men, Athenians and allies, embarked from Syracuse on their desperate overland flight (7.75.5). 

Only about 7,000 were captured alive (7.87.4), of whom many perished in squalid confinement in the 

Syracusan quarries. Some few escaped to the allied city of Catana and “found refuge,” thus receiving further postwar assistance from an important ally (7.85.4). Thucydides does not specify their number, but 

notes that all alike “suffered evils too great for tears” (7.75.4).

99 Thuc. 5.16.1, 7.50.4, and 7.86.5.

100 Plato’s Laches is typically grouped among the early dialogues composed between the death of 

Socrates in 399 BCE and Plato’s own first trip to Sicily in 387. 

101 See Paul Woodruff, “Plato’s Shorter Ethical Works,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016), ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab), available at <http://

plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/plato-ethics-shorter/>. 
55

Thucydides’ Other “Traps”

102 Thuc. 8.27.5, 8.29.2, 8.43.3, and 8.84.5.

103 Allison et al., Thucydides Trap Forum.

104 See Mark J. Valencia, “China Needs Patience to Achieve a Peaceful Rise,” South China Morning Post, February 7, 2014, available at <www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1422780/

china-needs-patience-achieve-peaceful-rise?page=all>. Optimistic U.S. observers interpret Xi’s call for “a 

new model of major country relations” as reference to a rational, necessary, and essential adjustment in 

the international order, already well underway, to accord China a status more in keeping with its capacity 

and aspirations. Those of a more pessimistic turn of mind interpret it as a demand for American capitulation and withdrawal from East Asia.

105 Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 

1969), 356.

106Thuc. 2.2 and 2.7.1. The Theban assault on Plataea marks the culmination of five decades of 

deteriorating stability in the Boeotia region of central Greece. The attack ruptures the Thirty Years’ Peace 

concluded by Athens and Sparta in 446, but for Thebes is merely an attempt to exploit “international” 

tensions to settle an old score close to home. The Plataeans, because of their longstanding alliance with 

Athens, had long held out against Theban hegemony. Plataea was the only polis to join the Athenians 

in resisting the first Persian invasion at Marathon in 490, arriving “with all available force” (pandemei/

pandhmei) at a critical moment and thus sharing in one of the most glorious, and improbable, military 

victories in the long history of Hellas. See Herodotus, Herodotus: The Histories: The Complete Translation, 

Backgrounds, Commentaries, ed. Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, trans. Walter Blanco (New York: W.W. Norton 

& Co., 2013), 6.108.1. Plataea paid a price for its loyalty as an ally. The city was razed to its foundations 

by the Spartans in 417, the 5th year of the Peloponnesian War, because the Athenians reneged on their 

promise to come to the relief of their ally (Thuc. 3.68.3–5).

107 Thuc. 1.1.3, 1.3.1, 1.3.4, and 1.4.

108 Kevin Carroll, review of Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, by Thuycidides, trans. Steven Lattimore, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, June 18, 1999, available at <http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1999/1999-

06-18.html>. Carroll highlights a revealing distinction between Thucydides’ use of eleutheria and autonomia in his review of Lattimore’s new English translation (1998), acknowledging previous work by Martin 

Ostwald (1982) and Elias Bickerman (1958). 

109 This factor is frequently underappreciated or ignored altogether by commentators who fixate 

on the direct contrast between Athens and Sparta (even though each frequently acts with or at the behest 

of allies throughout the Peloponnesian War), and compound that error by attempting to transfer this spurious, binary analysis to modern conflicts like the 20th-century Cold War or the current rivalry between 

the United States (cast by Allison, like Sparta, in the role of status quo power) and China (portrayed as 

Athens, the rising power destined to overturn a long-established power balance). It is hardly surprising 

that extrapolation of such an oversimplified reading of Thucydides would yield negligible analytical insight.

110 Thuc. 1.73.1. 

111 See Jared McKinney, “China-U.S.: Avoiding the ‘Improbable War,’” The Diplomat, April 10, 

2015, available at <http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/china-us-avoiding-the-improbable-war/>. As Nicias 

tells the Athenian Assembly during debate of the proposed Sicilian Expedition, “We ought not . . . to allow 
56 

Misenheimer

ourselves to be persuaded by foreigners into undertaking a war with which we have nothing to do.” See 

Organski and Kugler. The authors’ power transition theory research similarly accords a crucial role to allies in the initiation and subsequent conduct of war: “Alliances not only play a decisive part in widening a 

narrow conflict between the challenger and the dominant nation into a world war, they also exert a decisive 

role in winning such wars once they are started.”

112 Thuc. 6.6.2, 6.8.2, 6.18.1, 6.33, 6.50.4, 7.2.3–4, 7.3.1, 7.18.2, 7.28.3, and 7.42.1.

113 Thuc. 4.85–87.

114 Freeman.

115 Lam Peng Er, “China, the United States, Alliances, and War: Avoiding the Thucydides Trap,” 

Asian Affairs: An American Review 43, no. 2 (2016), 36. 

116 Thuc. 1.78.1.

117 Thuc. 1.140.1.

118 Thuc. 1.78, 2.11.4, 7.50.4, and 8.24.5. Thucydides mentions Arginousae at 8.101.2, but details 

of the fateful Athenian decision to execute the victorious generals after the naval battle at Arginousae 

(406 BCE) are recounted by Xenophon (Hellenika, 1.7) and Diodorus Siculus (13.101), who (separately) 

take up the events of the Peloponnesian War at the point where Thucydides’ History ceases. The History

amply illustrates Tyké’s penchant for humbling the strong or (less often) exalting the weak. With that in 

view, it is difficult not to read Nicias’ resonant appeal to the Athenian Assembly—be generous in outfitting the invasion force for Syracuse because “I wish as much as possible to make myself independent of 

fortune” (6.28.3)—as a dramatic turn worthy of the tragic poet Euripides, Thucydides’ contemporary. 

119 See, for example, The Economist: “Mr. Allison’s overall thesis is too gloomy” (“The Thucydides 

Trap: Will America and China Go to War?” The Economist, July 6, 2017); Albert Wolf: “Power transition theory may be mistaken, and in any event the expected transition may not come off as expected” 

(“What Thucydides’s Trap Gets Wrong about the United States and China,” Modern War Institute, July 

25, 2017); Michael Vlahos: “Allison transforms a trope of city-state rivalry into universal historical law 

and then ascribes its creation to Thucydides, thus giving Allison’s offspring a radiant, ancient, authority” (“Who Did Thucydides Trap?” The American Conservative, July 5, 2017); and Ilias Kouskouvelis: 

“Allison’s Thucydides Trap is ‘a distorted compass’” (“The Thucydides Trap: A Distorted Compass,” EInternational Relations, November 5, 2017).

120 Neville Morley periodically reminds readers of his blog that “Thucydides is always right about 

everything!” See Neville Morley, “Thucydides Is Always Right About Everything Part 796,” Sphinx, March 

9, 2014. This is not so much excessive praise for the historian’s surpassing wisdom as a rueful comment 

on the way politicians, scholars, and assorted experts over a period of centuries have sought to co-opt 

Thucydides’ name to valorize and validate their own idiosyncratic reading of contemporary wars or other 

events. This is, in fact, a particular focus of Morley’s own scholarship. He argues that the History’s unique 

ability to appear at once compellingly incisive and impenetrably obscure makes it uniquely suited to this 

objectionable practice of latter day ipse dixit. Thucydides is not, however, the only ancient authority currently being subjected to such treatment in the Indo-Pacific region. 

121 T. Greer, “The Thucydides Roundtable,” Zenpundit.com, October 2016, available at <http://

zenpundit.com/?p=52965>.

122 Herodotus, 6.108.
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123 Thuc. 1.86–87.

124 Thuc. 1.68–71. Indeed, the Corinthians’ strident harangue is calculated to convey a sense that 

war really is inevitable, and that delaying its onset will only benefit the enemy (for example, 1.69.5).

125 To be fair, scholars have adopted many approaches in analyzing the fact-set provided by 

Thucydides—a fact-set that includes only passing reference to the Megarian Decree, which both sides 

considered extremely important. 

126 Wilson.

127 It is striking that many reputable international relations analysts have overlooked this fundamental point altogether. Rather than rejecting Allison’s Thucydides Trap metaphor on this basis alone, 

many have proceeded directly to analyzing whether, and how, the supposed Trap can be avoided. 

128 Jaffe, 44. 

129 Although assuming the unity of Thucydides’ text is customary for scholars, at least Romilly.

130 Thuc. 5.84–5.111; and Morley, “The Thucydides Trap,” Sphinx, October 30, 2012.

131 Cited by Greg Myre, “From Ancient Greece, Lessons on the Risk of a Modern, Accidental 

War,” National Public Radio, May 3, 2017, available at <www.wfdd.org/ story/ancient-greece-lessons-riskmodern-accidental-war>. Such a lack of analytical rigor is not characteristic of Allison’s earlier work on 

the Cuban Missile Crisis. His 1971 book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis has been 

credited with revolutionizing the field of international relations. 

132 Allison, “Obama and Xi Must Think Broadly to Avoid a Classic Trap.” 

133 For example, Vlahos questions omission of crisis between the United Kingdom and the United States just prior to the American Civil War. War seemed inevitable at the time, but did not occur; see 

Michael Vlahos, “Who Did Thucydides Trap?”

134 Organski and Kugler, 179. In their own study of power transition theory, they reach the surprising conclusion that “nuclear weapons do not deter confrontations at all levels. To believe they do is to 

believe in magic.” In Destined for War, Allison reviews possible scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons 

and concludes that the United States must keep a nuclear option “in its toolkit for purposes of deterrence,” but he offers no response to the problem suggested by the three consecutive “no war” outcomes 

in the 2015 Belfer Center Case File. Since the updated 2017 Case File obscured it, perhaps no response is 

deemed necessary.

135 In appendix II (287–288) of Destined for War, Allison provides statements responding to previous criticism (characterized as “straw man” attacks) of the Thucydides’s Trap Case File. These responses 

are not convincing and do not address the objection that the Case File is clearly based on the Thucydides 

Trap metaphor and not the other way around. In contrast, one might agree or disagree with Organski’s 

work on power transition theory, but in The War Ledger it is clear that posited theories concerning state 

behavior are based on examination of a historical data set, and not vice versa. In discussion of this Case 

File question at an academic conference in 2017, one classicist remarked to the author: “It seems Graham 

Allison printed the bumper sticker and then found a car to stick it on.” 

136 Neville Morley, “The Thucydides Trap,” Sphinx, October 30, 2012, available at <https://

thesphinxblog.com/2012/10/30/the-thucydides-trap/>. This suggests, at best, disdain for what Thucydides 

actually did or did not say. The Belfer Center’s effort to tap the popularity of the DC/Warner Bros. film 

Wonder Woman in promoting Allison’s book carried that disdain still further. The film, released in the 
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United States on June 2, 2017, includes a scene in which Wonder Woman’s adversary, a cynical Miles Gloriosus, declares that “peace is only an armistice in an endless war.” The erudite Wonder Woman immediately “recognizes” the remark as a quote from none other than Thucydides—even though the line in fact 

has no connection whatsoever to him or the History. As the film became a summer blockbuster, the Belfer 

Center added to its Web site a movie still of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, along with a slogan promoting Allison’s book: “Wonder Woman knows Thucydides. Do you?” This promotional decision suggested 

that the Belfer Center, in common with Wonder Woman, does not know Thucydides. See Allison, “The 

‘Wonder Woman’ Guide to Avoiding War With China: It Might Take a Woman,” USA Today, July 8, 2017, 

available at <www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/07/07/wonder-woman-war-china-graham-allisoncolumn/452549001/>. Allison himself followed up in July with this op-ed, and in it he discusses the ersatz 

Thucydides quote at length, noting that it raises “a fundamental question about the relationship between 

mass violence and human nature.” He even invokes Kissinger to rebut its air of militarism, but he never 

gets around to mentioning that the quote is merely a bit of movie villain dialogue with no actual linkage 

to war, human nature, or Thucydides. 

137 Allison, How Trump and China’s Xi Could Stumble into War: When a Rising Power Threatens to Displace a Ruling Power, It Rarely Ends Well,” Washington Post, March 31, 2017, available at <www.

washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/31/how-trump-and-chinas-xi-could-stumble-intowar/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.81b6debee6ed>. His commentaries have typically overlooked less negative 

facets of the bilateral relationship, for example, ongoing Sino-American counterpiracy cooperation in 

Combined Task Force 151 off the East Africa coast, joint training by U.S. and Chinese forces for disaster 

assistance, and new trade deals worth a reported $253 billion signed during President Trump’s November 

2017 visit to Beijing.

138 Allison et al., “Avoiding Thucydides’s Trap.” In presentations on the Thucydides Trap over 

recent years, Allison has studiously equivocated concerning whether war between China and the United 

States really is “inevitable.” While typically voicing a hedging acknowledgement that war may not be inevitable, he typically asserts that conflict, more likely than not, is already inscribed in the book of destiny. His 

book develops this Janus-like outlook in both directions by including a chapter offering many creative 

scenarios on how war might break out, and a subsequent section entitled “Why War Is Not Inevitable.” 

The latter offers “clues for peace” distilled from the four “no war” outcomes in the Belfer Center Case File. 

Again, however, the clues appear within the context of an overarching view that war is, as the title declares, destined. In this regard, Allison’s remark (viii) that Thucydides’ History, if “read in context,” makes 

it “clear that [Thucydides] meant his claim about inevitability as hyperbole: exaggeration for the purpose 

of emphasis” is odd. In fact it is not at all clear that Thucydides, in this passage or any other, exaggerated 

for emphasis, and Thucydidean scholarship does not support such a view. “Exaggeration” for what purpose? “Emphasis” for whose benefit? This remark may reveal Allison’s own intention—in light of the fact 

that war traditionally sells more books than peace—but there is no basis for linking it with Thucydides.

139 Nye, 2.

140 Zoellick, “U.S., China and Thucydides.”

141 All who find his History useful in the analysis of political situations subsequent to the 5th

century BCE would appear to join him in that belief. Thucydides notes, for example, that the catastrophic 

breakdown of law and moral norms due to stasis reflects a pattern of human behavior that “always will 
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occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same” (3.82.2). Niccolò Machiavelli, who found much 

to agree with in the pages of Thucydides, also saw human nature as unchanging over time. He observes 

that, as a result, “the same dissensions appear in every age”; See Machiavelli, The Discourses (New York: 

Penguin Classics, 1984), 1.39, 278. It is solely because human nature is so enduring that wisdom proffered 

by ancient authors remains relevant today.

142 At least this is the traditional reading of Thuc. 1.22.4: 

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but 

if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an 

aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble 

if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay 

which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

143Romilly, 56. 

144 Sawyer, “Translating the Untranslatable.” Jeremy Mynott’s translation of Thucydides sought to 

avoid the “anachronistic concepts [and bias] derived from later developments and theories that he detected in some earlier translations.” He provides an exceptionally vivid summary of the translator’s challenge: 

The text is often articulated in long structures that, unlike the periodic prose of 

Demosthenes, Cicero and Gibbon, do not have a progressive forward movement, to be 

resolved and completed in their final cadences. Rather, a whole series of clauses shuffle 

forward together, each deliberately fashioned in a different grammatical construction to 

create a much more open texture. Within these there are many distortions of the natural 

word order to generate particular emphases and effects; and there are other innovations 

in (or liberties with) syntax and vocabulary. The meaning is sometimes highly compressed 

and, as with poetry, resists decompression. Thucydides wrote at an early stage in the 

development of Greek prose and was undoubtedly trying to forge an original style for 

what he rightly regarded as a new form of enquiry. At its best his prose is a very powerful 

and vivid vehicle for this, but often he seems to be straining too hard for his effects with 

artificial contrasts, asymmetries and abstractions. In addition, there are the purely 

practical uncertainties of knowing which parts of the text Thucydides himself regarded as 

finished and which were only drafts. In the case of some obscure passages, therefore, one 

can never be quite sure whether one is dealing with clumsy expression, unrevised draft, 

unreliable textual transmission, overwrought stylistic innovation or deliberate ambiguity. 

Greco-Roman historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 60–7 BCE), active in the age 

of Augustus, might agree. He penned a critique (De Thucydide) complaining of the “forced 
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expressions,” “artificialities,” and “riddling obscurity” of Thucydides’ dense and difficult 

Greek: “If people actually spoke like this, not even their mothers or their fathers would be 

able to tolerate the unpleasantness of it. In fact they would need translators, as if they were 

listening to a foreign language.”

145Alibaba, often described as China’s version of Amazon, inaugurated Singles Day in 2009—initially a celebration for the country’s lonely hearts on a date reflecting their singleness (11/11)—with only 

27 participating merchants. In 2016 (total revenue: $17.8 billion), more than 16,000 brands participated, 

with Apple, Burberry, Lululemon, and Victoria’s Secret joining for the first time. The event has become a 

barometer of China’s consumer economy, although some analysts have questioned Alibaba’s methodology for calculating sales totals. 

146China thus joined the ranks of the few states—Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, the 

United Kingdom, and the United States—that have developed homegrown large airliners. The 168-seat 

C919, developed by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), is similar in size to the 

Airbus A320 and Boeing 737-800.

147 The September 2016 industry solicitation for DC Universe Rebirth’s volume 1, issue 1, of 

New Super-Man, “Made In China, Part One,” carried this descriptive blurb: An impulsive act of heroism thrusts an arrogant young man into the limelight of Shanghai as China begins to form its own 

Justice League of powerful heroes. . . . When the world needed a new hero, China made him!” It is 

debatable whether this unprecedented innovation reflects Chinese soft power reshaping American popular culture, arte et marte, in a shocking reversal arguably comparable to the Athenian victory at Pylos, 

or rather a master stroke for American soft power—non ducor, duco—calculated to attract a potentially 

enormous new audience to the only popular art form original to the United States.

148 Wang Jianlin, a 62-year-old former People’s Liberation Army commander-turned–real estate developer with a net worth estimated at $32 billion, is one of China’s richest men. He also owns the 

AMC movie theater chain in the United States as well as Legendary Entertainment, the movie studio that 

coproduced Man of Steel and the Dark Knight films. Such billion-dollar investments in the American 

entertainment market appear at odds with a Chinese drive to provoke war and defeat the United States 

militarily.

149 “China’s Rare Earth Dominance: Another Global Resource Scramble in the Making?” Knowledge@Wharton, April 5, 2011, available at <http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/chinas-rareearth-dominance-another-global-resource-scramble-in-the-making/>.

150 J. Helliwell, R. Layard, and J. Sachs, eds., World Happiness Report 2017 (New York: Sustainable 

Development Solutions Network, 2017), available at <http://worldhappiness.report/>. Indeed, the report’s 

algorithms indicate that, despite the “new-found plenitude” of Chinese society, the subjective well-being of 

Chinese citizens is not keeping pace with the continuing rise of income and consumption levels. 

151 This is true despite the fact that many who have no hand in the war decision will indeed fall 

victim in the conflict their leaders choose to initiate. As the Spartan prisoners held in Athens after Pylos 

understood all too clearly, in war the arrow strikes at random; it has no regard for the victim’s qualities 

of character (or lack thereof) (4.40.2). Moreover, the history of warfare from Thucydides’ time to ours 
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indicates that even the initiators of unnecessary, aggressive war tend to feel victimized by exogenous and 

unjust hazards, rather than the consequence of their own actions, once war is underway. Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens (2.47.3–2.54.5 and 3.87.1–3) and stasis in Corcyra (3.70.1–3.85.1) chillingly 

illustrates the breakdown of ethical norms and social order in wartime. The Athenian decisions to reject 

Spartan peace overtures at Pylos (4.21), exterminate the people of Melos (5.84–5.111), and invade Sicily (6.9–6.14 and 6.21–6.25) demonstrate the parallel degradation of clarity, consistency, and coherence 

in political decisionmaking once the fog of war sets in. When the Spartan fleet entered the Piraeus, and 

Spartan hoplites garrisoned the Acropolis and enforced destruction of the Long Walls, it is to be expected 

that most Athenians saw only the unmerited aggression of a hated enemy, rather than an inevitable reaction to their own hubris and overreach. 

152 The title of Graham Allison’s book must therefore be judged especially unfortunate. Inclusion 

of a question mark—Destined for War?—would have rendered it at least marginally less so. 

153 To the extent that Allison’s view of “rising” and “ruling” powers has validity at all. As noted 

above, power transition theory is not universally accepted by international affairs specialists. Moreover, in 

The Future of Power Joseph Nye points out that the nature of a power “transition” may not be what it seems:

The power transition occurring in this century is sometimes called the rise of Asia, but 

it is more accurately called the recovery of Asia. In 1800, more than half of the world’s 

population was in Asia and more than half of the world’s product was in Asia. One 

hundred years later, more than half of the population was still in Asia, but only about 

20 percent of world product was. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are getting back to 

proportions that are historically more normal. 

154 See Ralph Jennings, “China Calmed Asian Maritime Dispute in 2017 Without Ceding Sovereignty,” VOANews.com, December 11, 2017, available at <www.voanews.com/a/south-china-sea-disputes-calming-down/4158167.html>.

155 Thuc. 4.19.2–4.

156 Allison, “How Trump and China’s Xi Could Stumble into War.”

157 Allison, Destined for War, xix–xx. The State Department’s “Memorandum of Conversation” 

on November 12, 1973, suggests how daunting the diplomatic task of building such mutual understanding might be. Few diplomats of Henry Kissinger’s generation (and fewer today) could establish common 

ground by so readily engaging Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on points of Marxist theory and its intellectual debt to G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. Over coming years, the U.S. side will need to cultivate comparable insight into the evolving interaction of nationalism and consumerism within Chinese 

society, and the policy implications of a transition from taoguangyanghui (keeping a low profile) to a 

strategy of fenfayouwei (striving for achievement). See Henry Kissinger et al., “Memorandum of Conversation,” Document 58, Beijing, November 12, 1973, 5:40–8:25 p.m., Foreign Relations of the United States, 

1969–1976, Vol. XVIII, China, 1973–1976, available at <https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/

frus1969-76v18/d58>.

158 Thuc. 1.123.1.
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About the Author

Alan Greeley Misenheimer, a career member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Service, is currently serving as Counselor for Peace and Reconciliation at the American Embassy in Kabul, 

Afghanistan. His 30-year Department of State career has focused primarily on U.S. policy in the 

Near East, including assignments as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassies in Kuwait 

and Yemen. He spent 2009–2010 in Iraq serving as Foreign Policy Advisor to the commanding 

general of Multi-National Corps–Iraq, and subsequently as the U.S. Ambassador’s Senior Advisor on Arab-Kurd issues in Kirkuk. After Iraq, he spent 2 years on the faculty of the National 

War College at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. His teaching centered on 

strategy and statecraft, including Thucydides as a resource for the modern strategist. His 2015–

2016 assignment as the State Department Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Study of War 

facilitated research for this case study. Mr. Misenheimer received the Chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 2018, following his tour as Senior 

Foreign Policy Advisor to the commanding general of U.S. Transportation Command. He is in 

the final stage of doctoral studies at Georgetown University, pursuing dissertation research on 

historical linkages among justice, peace, and war.