The Thucydides Trap refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often war. The concept originated with Herman Wouk, the novelist and World War II veteran, who used it in his Admiral Raymond A. Spruance lecture, delivered on April 16, 1980, at the U.S. Naval War College. Wouk compared the U.S.–Soviet Cold War to the "cold war" that developed between Athens and Sparta once they had defeated Persia, their common enemy, remarking:And more than two millennia later we seem still trapped in Thucydides' world. None of the ways in which those quarrelsome Greeks behaved is suited to these dread times of nuclear menace; yet we still behave in those ways, and can find no other. How do we break out of this Thucydidean trap, which now threatens to strangle, if not to destroy, our world? Decades later, the term was popularized by American political scientist Graham Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon. The term became widely used in 2015, being primarily applied to analysis of China–United States relations.
Supporting the thesis, Allison led a study at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that, among a sample of 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivaling a ruling power, 12 ended in war. That study, however, has come under considerable criticism, and scholarly opinion on the value of the Thucydides Trap concept—particularly as it relates to a potential military conflict between the United States and China—remains divided.
Origin
The expression was inspired by the ancient Athenian historian and military commander Thucydides (died c. 400 BCE), used first in a speech by Herman Wouk in 1980, and then revived by the American political scientist Graham Allison around 2011. Wouk described the trap as a precedent for the 20th-century Cold War: You remember that Athens and Sparta were the two great adversaries, the 'superpowers' of the Greek world; that they had allied themselves to fight off and defeat a common enemy, Persia; and that after the victory their alliance fell apart in a cold war.Wouk lamented the recurrence of superpower rivalry, particularly in the nuclear age, but concluded that he found hope in two sources. First, he pointed backward in time from Thucydides to the Biblical age, and specifically to Isaiah's prophecy: And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up its sword against nation, nor will they learn war anymore.Second, Wouk pointed to the valor displayed by American and allied soldiers, such as Admiral Spruance, the namesake of his lecture, Jonathan Netanyahu, the leader of the Entebbe raid, and Walter "Butch" Williams, a Vietnam veteran and winner of five Distinguished Service Crosses, who perished in a carrier accident:In their deaths, I find embodied at once the sadness at the historic trap we are in, and the hope that mankind, which produced such courageous, noble, and clear-seeing spirits, will yet find its way to the light that was in them, and that burns for us.Seizing on an observation by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War that "it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable" (or, in the translation by Richard Crawley, "The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable"), Allison used the term to describe a tendency towards war when a rising power (such as Athens) challenges the status of a ruling power (such as Sparta). Allison expanded on this idea in his 2017 book Destined for War, in which he argued that "China and the US are currently on a collision course for war". Though Allison argues in Destined for War that war between a "ruling power" and "rising power" is not inevitable, war may be very difficult to avoid and requires extensive and intensive diplomatic attention and exertion in the case of a "Thucydides trap".
Definition For Wouk, the trap is that pending the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophesy, superpowers will continue to take up arms against each other, leaving the United States to depend on those who "stand in the breach" and "serve." Despite the sadness of this predicament, Wouk believed that the United States was fortunate in that "[t]here are hundreds of Spruances in this country. And there are hundreds of young Netanyahus in Israel, and in America there are thousands of Butch Williamses." For Allison, the term describes the theory that when a great power's position as hegemon is threatened by an emerging power, there is a significant likelihood of war between the two powers. In Allison's words:
Thucydides's Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power ... the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception. To advance his thesis, Allison led a case study by Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that among 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivaling a ruling power, 12 ended in war. The cases included in Allison's original study are listed in the following table:
Influence The term and arguments surrounding it have had influence in international media (including Chinese state media) and among American and Chinese politicians.
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