The Thucydides Trap Summary

In the article, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” the author, Graham Allison, contends that the two current, dominating world powers will collide in an epic war in the coming years. He acknowledges the ancient author, Thucydides, and his warning of the “dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power” (Allison 1). Allison then applies this idea to the current relationship between the United States, a nation that has dominated the world for the last seventy years, and China, an incredibly recent dominating force that threatens the United States’s place in the world. He gives the evidence that in the last five centuries there has been sixteen documented occurrences of the Thucydides trap, and of those, roughly eighty percent of the occurrences have resulted in war. Allison argues that this is the future of the world, hypothesizing that in the next decade, the United States and China will go to war. Practically the entire argument relies on history as evidence that these two powers will collide. First Allison makes the connection of the Peloponnesian War, when rising Athens challenges the powerful Sparta into a

The best option that Allison points out is the “radical changes in attitudes and actions by leaders and publics alike” (Allison 10). First, the United States has to be open to the idea of multipolarity, and remove the ideas of being the lone superpower of the world, and accept that China is at the very least, its equal. Then, China needs to avoid being hubris and arrogant, and also accept the role of being the United State’s equal for the time being instead of continuing to try to further surpass the world. China and the United States will go to war is either one does not accept their equality with the other, and until both countries attitudes and actions reflect this equality war seems likely to be on the