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

War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" sixteen times. In twelve of the sixteen-from war between the French and the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century to the two world wars o...