The Thucydides Trap: Are We Walking Into It?

International Relations

The greatest danger may not be that Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran or others consciously desire a wider conflagration. It is that each believes escalation can be managed. Until it cannot!

By Vijay Makhan

Xi Jinping invoked an ancient warning during Donald Trump’s recent visit to Beijing. It deserves more than passing attention. At a time when great-power rivalry is sharpening, wars are raging or smouldering across several regions and the institutions created to contain international conflict are visibly weakening, the conditions that once propelled Athens and Sparta towards catastrophe are beginning to look disturbingly familiar.

Xi Jinping’s ancient warning during Donald Trump’s recent Beijing visit deserves attention. As great-power rivalry intensifies and global institutions weaken, the conditions that once drove Athens and Sparta to catastrophe are becoming disturbingly familiar. Pic – Open Magazine

There was a curious moment during Trump’s visit to China which deserved more attention than it received. He had travelled to Beijing clearly anxious to display the personal chemistry which he so often regards as an instrument of diplomacy. There was much talk of friendship and of his relationship with Xi. Indeed, he went looking for an embrace from the Dragon. It did not materialise.

Instead, Xi reached back some two and a half millennia and invoked Thucydides. He asked in substance, could their two countries avoid the “Thucydides Trap” — the historical predicament in which the rise of one great power creates such apprehension in the established power that confrontation becomes increasingly difficult to avoid? It was an intriguing intervention. More importantly, it was a warning.

As a student of history and international relations, I could hardly allow such an invocation to pass unnoticed. Much of my writing of late has addressed the upheavals unfolding around us, but I have found myself returning repeatedly to history in seeking to understand them. Not because history repeats itself with mechanical precision, but because the present so often carries echoes of choices made, warnings ignored and miscalculations committed before. Xi’s reference to Thucydides therefore struck a particular chord. It invited reflection well beyond the immediate theatre of Sino-American relations.

The question today is not confined to whether China will displace the United States as the world’s predominant power. As one surveys the current international landscape, one detects several of the ingredients that Thucydides identified more than two thousand years ago: fear, power, ambition, insecurity, alliances, prestige and miscalculation.

The trappings of the trap are increasingly in place.

Athens, Sparta — and Fear

Thucydides’ celebrated explanation for the Peloponnesian War was simple—the rise of Athens and the fear it inspired in Sparta made war inevitable. But was it really inevitable? Should we fall into the intellectual trap of believing that whenever one power rises and another feels threatened, war must necessarily follow? History does not repeat itself so mechanically. But history warns.

Thucydides’ insight was not merely that Athens became stronger. It was that the changing balance of power altered perceptions, generated fear, affected calculations of security and eventually narrowed the political space within which tolerance remained possible.

That is what makes Xi’s reference so pertinent today. Washington perceives China’s rise as a strategic challenge. Its economic weight, technological capacity, military modernisation, expanding maritime presence and growing diplomatic influence already alter the international balance. The Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS, its increasingly important relationships throughout the Global South and its expanding presence across the Indo-Pacific and Indian Ocean all form part of a changing geopolitical landscape.

Unsurprisingly, Washington responds through its military partnerships and alliances, its strategic deployments, and the securitisation of technology. Trade is now an instrument of geopolitical competition. Tariffs and sanctions are diplomatic tools.

While one side regards what it does as defensive, the other interprets it as potentially offensive. An old dilemma of international relations. One country’s search for security becomes another country’s source of insecurity.

Beyond Washington and Beijing

It would be a mistake to confine the Thucydidean warning to the United States and China. The conflict in Ukraine cannot be reduced to a simplistic contest between two great powers. However, some of the underlying dynamics identified by Thucydides are unmistakably present. Russia speaks of encirclement and strategic insecurity. European states speak of the threat posed by Russian expansionism. NATO strengthens its eastern flank. Moscow responds. Military expenditure rises. Deterrence is reinforced to create security while the opposing side consequently feels less secure.

The circle feeds upon itself. None of this is to absolve states of the consequences for the decisions they take or to suggest moral equivalence between aggression and response. It is simply about recognising a dangerous strategic phenomenon: fear has once again become a major organising principle of international relations.

The Middle East: The Danger of What Might Be

The Middle East offers an even more disturbing illustration. The historical analogy cannot be literal. Iran is not Athens. Israel is not Sparta. Nor is Iran about to challenge the United States for global predominance. The underlying logic? A state fears not simply what another state possesses today, but what it might possess tomorrow. It acts because of what an adversary might eventually become capable of doing.

Preventive action produces retaliation. Retaliation produces counter-retaliation. Allies become involved. Military objectives expand. Political prestige becomes invested in the outcome. Leaders who confidently predicted short engagements discover that wars develop logics of their own.

The present Middle Eastern conflict bears witness to that. Grandiloquent declarations of “obliteration” and overwhelming force could not disguise an elementary truth which history has demonstrated repeatedly — wars are much easier to start than to end. And once unleashed, their consequences travel far beyond the countries firing the missiles.

Mauritius knows something about that. So do other vulnerable small states whose populations have had no say whatsoever in the decisions leading to conflict but nevertheless face higher fuel bills, freight charges, insurance premiums, inflationary pressures, disrupted supply chains and increasing uncertainty.

Distance no longer provides insulation from geopolitical folly.

The Trap Within the Trap

There is, however, an additional dimension to the present predicament which makes our situation potentially even more dangerous. The architects of the post-1945 international order understood what unrestrained power politics had done to the world twice within barely three decades.

The United Nations, international law, multilateral diplomacy and the network of institutions constructed were never perfect. Nor did they abolish war. But they were intended to provide mechanisms through which disagreement could be channelled before confrontation became catastrophe.

Today those mechanisms are under strain. The UN has repeatedly found itself marginalised precisely when it is most needed. The Security Council remains paralysed by competing interests and the veto. International law is too frequently invoked when convenient and disregarded when inconvenient. Sanctions, tariffs and economic coercion have become routine instruments of statecraft. Military expenditure is climbing. Nuclear arsenals are being revamped. Strategic alliances are multiplying.

And what is most worrying is that diplomacy is resorted to after military action rather than before it. Aren’t we recreating some of the conditions of the Thucydides Trap while simultaneously weakening the institutions designed to prevent us from falling into it?

When History Warns

There is another historical warning worth recalling. Europe before 1914 didn’t exist in wilderness. It possessed sophisticated governments, professional diplomatic services, extensive international commerce and societies linked through finance, culture and trade. Yet the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo set in motion a chain of events that transformed a regional crisis into a continental war and eventually into a global catastrophe: the First World War. It was not a carefully designed event orchestrated by a group of leaders sitting around a table.

Decisions accumulated. Ultimatums followed ultimatums. Mobilisation produced counter-mobilisation. Alliances reduced room for manoeuvre. Prestige made retreat more difficult. And political leaders repeatedly believed that they could control the next stage of escalation.

That perhaps is the lesson which should trouble us most today. The greatest danger may not be that Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran or others consciously desire a wider conflagration. It is that each believes escalation can be managed. Until it cannot!

Thucydides’ Warning

Which brings me back to Xi Jinping and that intriguing exchange in Beijing. Can the United States and China avoid the Thucydides Trap?

They certainly can.

Nothing in history decrees that Washington and Beijing must eventually confront one another militarily. Nor should Thucydides be transformed into some convenient doctrine of inevitability. To do so would itself be dangerous, because governments that become convinced that conflict is ultimately unavoidable may begin preparing for it in ways that make it more likely.

Thucydides should therefore be read as a warning, not a prophecy. But warnings are useful only when they are heeded. That requires something which appears remote in today’s world — restraint.

It requires diplomacy before confrontation rather than diplomacy to repair the damage afterwards. It requires recognition that international law cannot command respect if powerful states apply it selectively. It requires a functioning multilateral system in which smaller states have a voice rather than merely suffering the consequences of decisions taken elsewhere. And it requires great powers to understand that strength is not diminished by accommodation where accommodation is possible.

These are not expressions of idealism. They are instruments of survival.

For small states in particular, strategic foresight, regional cooperation and proactive diplomacy have become indispensable. As I argue more extensively in my forthcoming work on the changing geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, small states can no longer afford simply to observe the manoeuvres of the great powers from the sidelines. In an age of geopolitical fracture, their vulnerabilities demand engagement, anticipation and collective action.

Xi Jinping invoked an ancient historian to warn against an ancient error. The warning looks increasingly contemporary. From the Taiwan Strait to the battlefields of Ukraine, and from the Gulf and the wider Middle East to the increasingly contested waters of the Indo-Pacific, the ingredients are accumulating: fear, ambition, insecurity, competing alliances, military build-ups, wounded prestige and, perhaps most dangerously, the conviction that escalation can always be controlled.

The Thucydides Trap is not yet our destiny.

But we would be extraordinarily unwise to pretend that its jaws are not already visible.

26 August 2026

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 28 August 2026