HOW SHOULD LEADERS AND POLICYMAKERS THINK about relative shifts in power between countries? Are there principles from history that countries can look back to that help understand geopolitical tensions when countries increase their political and economic power? These are the questions that help us navigate conflicts and understand prospects for peace.
Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and former Kennedy School dean, has argued that we can take a lesson from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BCE when the rising city-state of Athens challenged the dominant existing power of Sparta. Thucydides wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Allison has looked to Thucydides and his exploration of the tensions between a rising and established world power to understand the relationship between China and the United States. In his 2017 book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap?,” Allison argues that history shows many instances where rising powers challenge established ones, and often these situations end in war—though not always. Allison’s Thucydides’ Trap has since become an influential metaphor in international relations as experts think about the friction between China and the United States—and ways that they might avoid devastating conflict. The Institute for National Strategic Studies and the National Defense University Press, for example, published analyses interpreting the Thucydides Trap in the context of U.S.–China dynamics. Allison’s analysis has also generated attention in China. President Xi Jinping frequently uses it to identify the challenge today’s two great powers face; for example, in his meeting with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in October 2023, he said “The ‘Thucydides Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.” Indeed, during Allison’s quarterly visits to China, Xi and key members of his team have engaged him directly to explore opportunities for escaping the Thucydides Trap.
Allison chairs the Harvard China Working Group that includes faculty from across the university and is pursuing ongoing work at the Kennedy School that grapples with the nature and future of U.S.-China competition. The rivalry between the United States and China, Allison has argued, encompasses four key areas that he and his colleagues at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs have researched and reported on: rivalry in economics, technology, military power, and diplomacy. These reports were originally prepared as part of a package of transition memos for the Trump-Biden transition after the November 2020 election.
Allison and others at the Belfer Center and the Kennedy School continue to lead in our understanding of the ways the United States and China compete and cooperate as world powers.
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Banner photo by Ng Han Guan/AFP; portrait by Martha Stewart