US and China at war? Why Thucydides Trap or Cold War analogies are deeply unhelpful

The emergence of new technologies, including in nuclear weaponry, and cyberspace has changed international relations and rendered the analogies meaningless

Instead, treating the Sino-American relationship as a complex but unique relationship would enable a more positive focus and downsize the negativity dominating discourse

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Nicholas Ross Smith

Nicholas Ross Smith is an adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Published: 3:30am, 10 Dec 2021

Recently, the Financial Times ran an article with the headline “The US and China are already at war. But which kind?” The author, Gillian Tett, bases many of her assertions on one of the most popular historical analogies employed by Sino-American doomsayers: Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap.

The Thucydides Trap is a historical analogy used to warn against the potential for imminent conflict between the United States and China. It draws insights from the Peloponnesian war where, it is alleged, Sparta pre-emptively attacked Athens because it feared Athens’ rise.

Allison argues that the US could fall into the same trap with how it views (and responds to) China’s rise.

Allison’s work has easily become the most influential international relations work over the past decade (he coined the term in the Financial Times in 2012). However, just because it is influential does not make it useful.