Xi Jinping recalls Thucydides' trap in summit with Trump. Here's what it is

The name comes from Thucydides, the Athenian historian who recounted the Peloponnesian War not as a mere isolated clash, but as the result of a structural transformation of the balance of power in the Greek world. After the Persian wars, Athens had grown as a naval, economic and imperial power. Sparta, a traditional land power, began to see that rise as a direct threat. The essential point, in the formula attributed to Thucydides and taken up by Allison, is that it was the growth of Athenian power and the fear caused in Sparta that made conflict increasingly likely.

Allison does not argue that war between the US and China is inevitable, but that the combination of Chinese ascendancy, American fear, domestic nationalism, territorial disputes, technology competition and political pressure risks creating a high-risk situation if it is not managed with constant and careful diplomacy.

Xi therefore makes a precise reference. Beijing wants to present its rise not as a threat, but as a process that Washington should accept without trying to contain it. The United States, on the contrary, sees China as a systemic challenge: industrial, technological, military and ideological. The 'trap', therefore, is not an automatic mechanism of history, but the risk that each side interprets the other's moves in the most hostile way possible, ending up by confirming its own fears and then reacting.

The reference to Thucydides also serves to lend historical depth to a summit taking place at a time of great international turbulence. Taiwan remains the most sensitive point in the strategic confrontation. "The Taiwan issue is the most important issue in China-US relations," Xi said at the summit, according to the official Xinhua news agency. According to the Chinese president, if the dossier is handled correctly, relations between the two countries can maintain overall stability. "If it is not handled correctly, the two countries could clash or even come into conflict, pushing the whole China-US relationship into a very dangerous situation," Xi said.

Allison spoke of the Thucydides trap back in 2015, on the occasion of the meeting between then US President Barack Obama and Xi Jinping himself during the Chinese president's first state visit to the US. The American historian was already theorising about a probable war in the coming decade between the two powers. In the past 500 years, in 12 of the past 16 cases where an emerging power has clashed with a dominant power, the result has been bloodshed, Allison reasoned. Who cited World War I as a warning: in 1914, few could have imagined carnage on such a scale as to require a new category: world war. "When the conflict ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the Kaiser was dead, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had dissolved, the Russian Tsar had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France had bled for a generation, and England had been deprived of its youth and riches. A millennium in which Europe had been the political centre of the world came to an abrupt end,' Allison wrote in the Atlantic. The only times when emerging power and hegemonic power managed to avoid war were when both sides, the challenger and the challenged, made huge and painful adjustments in attitude and action.

Continuing with the World War I parallel, Allison argued already 11 years ago: 'One of the risks associated with the Thucydides trap is that the ordinary routine - and not just an extraordinary, unexpected event - can trigger large-scale conflicts. When an emerging power threatens to oust a dominant power, ordinary crises that would otherwise be contained, such as the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can set off a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes that neither side would otherwise have chosen'.

In Beijing with Trump, Xi not only hoped that the Thucydides trap would be avoided, but called for the two countries to jointly address major challenges to global stability and work towards "a better future" for humanity, so from CCTV's official broadcast of his keynote speech.