For those unfamiliar, there’s a website called Jmail that has repurposed Jeffrey Epstein’s emails into a Gmail format, so it appears that one is actually browsing the late paedophile’s inbox. It is a treasure trove of nonsensical information which showed just how deeply entrenched a former high school teacher with no formal graduation degree had become at manufacturing contacts among the high and mighty. In that treasure trove of gems are numerous exchanges with Noam Chomsky, the man who explained how the elites manufactured consent but still perhaps couldn’t avoid the temptation of hanging out with those who manufactured it.Among the exchanges was a hilarious repartee, in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Noam Chomsky: “Donald Trump has written three books. That makes him one of the few people in the world who has written more books than he has read.”Ergo, it’s highly unlikely that he has heard of Thucydides (pronounced thoo-SID-ih-deez), the 5th-century BCE Athenian historian who had argued that war between a ruling power and emerging power was inevitable. He had surmised the problem stating: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”And that’s the trap that ‘Philosopher King’ Xi Jinping wants to avoid when coming up against Don Tzu, but who is Thucydides anyway? What trap did he lay? And will the US and China go to war?
Thucydides – who, what, why
There’s an ontological moment in Avengers: Infinity War when Star-Lord asks Iron Man: Who is Gamora? Iron Man says he will do one better asking: “Who is Gamora?” Drax, never one to be left behind, quips: Why is Gamora?So, who is Thucydides? Why is he being mentioned here? And what is the Thucydides Trap?
Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general who wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the ruinous conflict between the city-states of Athens and Sparta, which lasted from 431 BCE to 404 BCE, about 50 years before Leonidas showed up with 300 buff dudes with CGI abs to fight Persians. Thucydides wrote the book because he had a healthy disdain for historians embellishing war accounts with talk of gods and storytelling and wrote: “…but I have written not for immediate applause but for posterity, and I shall be content if the future student of these events, or of other similar events which are likely in human nature to occur in after ages, finds my narrative of them useful.”And it is a useful narrative, explaining how Athens, a rising power, threatened Sparta, which led to the aforementioned ruinous war.In modern parlance, “Thucydides Trap” was popularised by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison to describe the danger of how an established power reacts to an upstart. Allison’s Harvard Belfer Center project studied 16 such cases over 500 years to find 12 ended in war, though none of them were post-World War II and not since the global economic system became so interdependent or since the big N arrived in our lives.But before that, it was a free-for-all.
The lesson from history
History isn’t a spreadsheet, but certain patterns do repeat. When a new power rises, the old power gets nervous and things go south.That is what happened in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. France wanted to stop Prussia from becoming too powerful. Instead, Bismarck used the war to unite the German states, defeat France, capture Napoleon III and declare the German Empire at Versailles in 1871. France tried to stop a future it feared and helped create it.The same fear shaped Europe before World War I. Germany was rising fast after unification in 1871. Britain feared German naval power. Germany feared being surrounded by Britain, France and Russia. Russia’s recovery after its defeat to Japan in 1905 made German planners believe time was running out. Then, in 1914, one assassination in Sarajevo helped turn Europe’s anxieties into a world war.
But history also shows escape is possible. Portugal and Spain avoided war over overseas empires. Britain and America avoided war in the early 20th century because Britain gradually accepted America’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere. During the Cold War, from 1947 to 1991, the US and Soviet Union fought through proxies, spies, arms races and ideology, but never directly.
US vs China – clash of worldviews
The first time Trump was elected in 2016, Xi had a rather hard time wrapping his head around the idea of America electing Trump and told Barack Obama: “If an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know who to blame.”The words prove to be oddly prophetic, which makes Xi’s invocation of Thucydides rather intriguing as America and China joust over tariffs, Taiwan and semiconductors.
At the heart of the battle is something more. If the Cold War was ostensibly over ideology, America’s and China’s differences come from a different philosophical view of the world, though one could argue America no longer fully subscribes to that worldview under MAGA.America was formed because it never wanted to be ruled by a king again. Its founding myth is rebellion: tea thrown into a harbour, pamphleteers denouncing tyranny, farmers with muskets facing an empire, and a republic built around the suspicion that any ruler given too much power will eventually start measuring curtains for a throne room. The American state was designed to frustrate power: divide it, check it, litigate it, mock it, drag it through Congress, leak against it, subpoena it and vote it out before it starts speaking in the royal “we”.Today, it also views itself as the inheritor of Athens, Rome, Magna Carta, the British constitutional tradition and the European Enlightenment, as Marco Rubio evoked while warning Europeans about “civilisational erasure”. China, on the other hand, doesn’t fear the king; it often reveres him. What it fears is chaos: the kingdom falling apart. Its ultimate nightmare is dynastic collapse, with warlords running amok and even a demagogue who failed the imperial exam imagining he is Jesus’ younger brother and setting up a parallel government.The Chinese political imagination is haunted by the broken realm. The ruler may be harsh, distant or suffocating, but the absence of order is remembered as worse.So America’s founding warning is: never again a king.China’s civilisational warning is: never again a broken kingdom.That is why the two countries talk past each other. When America speaks of liberty, China hears disorder waiting to happen. When China speaks of stability, America hears tyranny laundering itself as wisdom. America built a republic to stop Caesar. China built a state to stop the empire from shattering.Xi’s authoritarian philosophy is unique: he uses Confucius for legitimacy, Han Feizi for discipline, Lenin for organisation and Silicon Valley for surveillance: old civilisational language to justify a modern party-state of censorship, control and technological discipline.Washington, on the other hand, which gave China too much of a hand during the Cold War and then helped knit it into the global economy, now views Beijing as its first real challenger since the Soviet Union.There are fundamental differences between the Bear and the Dragon. The Soviet Union cajoled, threatened and seduced the world with ideology, creating outposts all the way from Vietnam to Cuba.
China, on the other hand, is like a giant Avatar tree with the world plugged into its glowing sockets. It dominates supply chains, buys commodities, builds infrastructure, competes in AI and sits inside the global economy in a way that it can be mistrusted but never eradicated.Of course, today, America is less Monroe and more Donroe, whose doctrine is much simpler:1. Don’t even pretend the rules-based international order exists. 2. Admit America is best. 3. Make a deal. 4. Seek revenge. 5. We are America, b****, we do what we want. The rub is that China is one country Trump cannot coerce or bully into submission. Xi, on the other hand, wants to avoid the Thucydides Trap because he realises, more than anything, that given the nature of American democracy, MAGA may dominate a season, but it is not the American state. He is not merely negotiating with Trump; he is negotiating with a system that will eventually produce successors, factions, reversals and corrections.
The N-Deterrent and global economy
Of course, the final word on the Thucydides Trap involves two things that Athenians and Spartans never had to contend with: nuclear weapons and economic dependency.Since 1945, great powers have discovered that direct war between nuclear states is less an instrument of policy and more a suicide note with launch codes. At the end of the day, the US-Soviet rivalry never went hot because Washington and Moscow both knew that an all-out war would mean annihilation for both sides. So they fought through proxies, coups, spies, arms races, propaganda, ideology and on Ivy League campuses.Also, unlike the US and the USSR, the US and China are tied at the hip when it comes to the economy. America needs Chinese manufacturing, minerals, markets and supply chains. China needs American consumers, technology access, capital flows and, as much as it would hate to admit it, global legitimacy.This does not make war impossible. Human beings have never allowed common sense to permanently interfere with stupidity. But it does make war far more ruinous than the old model suggests.In Thucydides’ world, rivals could burn each other’s cities. In ours, they can burn the global economy, irradiate the future and still discover neither side has technically won.That is why the Athens-Sparta template is incomplete. Since 1945, the great powers have not avoided direct war because they became wiser. They avoided it because nuclear weapons and economic interdependence turned victory into a very expensive form of suicide.
The Carthage Curse
And finally, there’s something beyond the Thucydides Trap that requires both China and America not to go off their rocker: the Carthage Curse. Sallust, the Roman historian and protégé of Caesar, warned in Bellum Catilinae: “After the destruction of Carthage, when fear of a rival had been removed, fortune began to grow cruel. All the evils that prosperity fosters luxury, greed, arrogance flourished. For before that time, fear of the enemy had kept the state sound. When that fear was gone, pleasure and pride entered, and with them decay.”
In the Thucydides Trap, a ruling power and a rising power can destroy each other through fear. In the Carthage Curse, a power destroys itself because there is no rival left to discipline it.That is the darker warning. A rival can kill you. But the absence of a rival can rot you.America discovered this after the Soviet Union collapsed. The unipolar moment arrived, the “end of history” became elite mood music, and then came overreach, Iraq, financialisation, institutional decay, culture war, conspiracy politics and finally Trump. America did not begin to fray because China rose. In many ways, China rose into a world where America had already started arguing with itself in the mirror.China should read Sallust too. America is Beijing’s disciplining enemy. Its pressure allows Xi to demand unity, sacrifice, technological self-reliance and obedience. But if China were to get the world it wants, with America humbled, Asia rearranged and the party-state vindicated, what then? Would the discipline remain, or would triumph breed its own arrogance, corruption and decay?That is the final trap. Thucydides warns that fear of a rival can lead to war. Sallust warns that the absence of a rival can lead to rot. Between them lies the cursed logic of great powers: too much fear can destroy you from outside, too little fear can destroy you from within.So even if America and China avoid Thucydides, Carthage will still be waiting. Because history’s cruelest joke is that empires can survive their enemies and still lose to themselves.And yet, for now, the world does not need either lesson tested. It merely needs the two most powerful countries on earth to avoid turning history into a live demonstration. So hopefully, Trump will TACO and declare victory. Xi will convince Iran to back off, not out of charity but because China needs oil, shipping lanes and a world economy that hasn’t been set on fire. And the rest of us can breathe a little more peacefully.
