Thucydides Trap

[17] Foreign policy scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have stated that the Thucydides Trap has "become canonical", a "truism now invoked, ad nauseam, in explaining U.S.–China rivalry".

[18] Furthermore, BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus has quipped that Graham Allison's book expanding on the Thucydides trap, Destined For War, "has become required reading for many policymakers, academics and journalists".

"[20] The term gained further influence in 2018 as a result of an increase in US-Chinese tensions after US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on almost half of China's exports to the US, leading to a trade war.

Lawrence Freedman, writing in Prism, the National Defense University's journal of complex operations, has similarly argued that "China’s main interest has always been its regional position, and if that is the case, then there are strong arguments for it to show patience, as its economic pull becomes progressively stronger.

[25][26] Foreign policy scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have similarly argued that the Thucydides Trap "fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development", contending that it is China—and not the United States—that faces impending stagnation.

James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, in his article "Oh God, Not the Peloponnesian War Again", wrote of the Thucydides Trap that "conflicts between city-states in a backwater Eurasian promontory 2,400 years ago are an unreliable guide to modern geopolitics—and they neglect a vast span of world history that may be far more relevant".

Lawrence Freedman has similarly argued that "[t]he case studies deployed by Allison", which "come from times when issues of war and power were viewed differently than they are today", tell us "very little of value", concluding that "the Thucydides Trap is an unhelpful construct".

[24] Scholar David Daokai Li writes that the Thucydides Trap theory is flawed as applied to U.S.–China relations, because the model is based on Western and Ancient Greek analogies.

[29] Finally, some have noted that Chinese state propaganda outlets have latched onto the narrative of the Thucydides Trap in order to promote a set of power relations that favors China.

He cites fundamental differences between states as a key factor, explaining why such a dynamic did not emerge between the UK and the US despite the latter's rise but is evident in the tensions between the US and China due to their contrasting political and economic systems.

[27] Historian Arthur Waldron likewise argued that Kagan and Harvard classics scholar Ernst Badian had "long ago proved that no such thing exists as the 'Thucydides Trap'" with regards to the Peloponnesian War.

[26] Relatedly, political scientists Athanassios Platias and Vasilis Trigkas submitted that the Thucydides Trap is based on "inadvertent escalation" whereas the Peloponnesian war was an outcome of rational calculations.

In a case study for the Institute for National Strategic Studies, the military research arm of the National Defense University, Alan Greeley Misenheimer says that "Thucydides’ text does not support Allison's normative assertion about the 'inevitable' result of an encounter between 'rising' and 'ruling' powers" and that while it "draws welcome attention both to Thucydides and to the pitfalls of great power competition" it "fails as a heuristic device or predictive tool in the analysis of contemporary events".