THE FREE PRESS Why Xi Invoked the Thucydides Trap President Donald Trump reviews an honor guard with Chinese president Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony on May 14 in Beijing, China. (Alex Wong via Getty Images) At his meeting with Trump, the Chinese leader mentioned an American academic's pet theory about superpower struggles. There’s a reason for that. By Aaron MacLean 05.15.26 —

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Why Xi Invoked the Thucydides Trap

President Donald Trump reviews an honor guard with Chinese president Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony on May 14 in Beijing, China. (Alex Wong via Getty Images)

At his meeting with Trump, the Chinese leader mentioned an American academic's pet theory about superpower struggles. There’s a reason for that.

By Aaron MacLean

05.15.26 —

International

Aaron MacLean is a columnist at The Free Press, national security analyst at CBS News, and host of the School of War podcast.

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If critics are failed artists, then within the heart of every scholar of international relations lurks the will to actual power over human affairs. Sometimes a scholar like Henry Kissinger achieves high office. But the next best thing is to hear one’s ideas about world politics on the lips of the great: exciting evidence that those ideas are shaping elite political thinking, and perhaps even world events themselves.

It must then be bliss for Graham Allison, who has popularized the idea of the “Thucydides Trap,” to hear Xi Jinping cite the notion during this week’s summit in Beijing. On Thursday, as the two leaders gathered for their summit at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Xi gave introductory remarks in Chinese and warned that the U.S. and China should beware, per an official English-language translation, the “Thucydides Trap.” It was not the first time Xi has invoked the concept, which he has raised as far back as 2014.

The idea is straightforward. In his account of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides asserted that war between Athens and Sparta was inevitable, because of the “fear” that Athens’ rise inspired in Sparta, then the established hegemon. Allison’s now extremely well-popularized gloss is an attempt at elevating this specific claim to a universal principle: When a status-quo power is challenged by an upstart, war is the result most of the time. In his 2017 book, Allison says that 12 out of 16 such historical cases since the year 1500 have resulted in war. Avoiding bloodshed requires “radical changes in attitudes and actions,” not least for the established power.

In 2026, that power, obviously, is the United States, challenged by a rising China. If Washington insists on a policy of confrontation with Beijing, war will be the likely, if not inevitable, outcome, per Allison’s theory. The “radical change” in our position required to avoid war would involve various forms of accommodation—we must learn to stop worrying and love Chinese power—much as, for example, Britain ultimately accepted America’s rise in the early 20th century. If America wants war, then we should support our allies and work to deter China. But if we want peace, we need to radically change our attitudes and actions and accommodate ourselves to a Chinese-led world order.

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Xi’s deployment of the Thucydides Trap at the summit, then, was no friendly expression of a shared desire for peace. It was an entirely unsubtle warning, and even a threat. It is no mystery why Xi Jinping has eagerly embraced Allison’s theory, given how it involves the inevitability of China’s rise and the urgent necessity for America to accommodate it. In Allison’s conception, if China’s campaign of territorial expansion and its relentless bullying of its neighbors in the western Pacific leads to war—the fault would, in large part, be ours. It is all but the perfect tool of information warfare for targeting an elite American audience—hence Xi’s invocation of it.

If Xi also offered to radically change China’s attitudes and actions, that part didn’t make the summit’s official readout. What was in the readout was the assertion that if the question of Taiwan is not “handled properly,” then the outcome for China and America will be “clashes and even conflicts”—as bald a threat as you might like.

Unsurprisingly, in a piece published just before the summit, Allison floated the possibility that President Trump could make concessions on Taiwan during his meeting with Xi. There is no indication that any concessions actually were offered—or, indeed, any indication that Allison has the kind of sway with the Trump administration that he does in Beijing, where he has made numerous visits since his notion of the trap came to prominence, including at least one meeting with Xi and multiple meetings with Politburo member and CCP house intellectual Wang Huning. Allison is not the first American of note to attempt the role of academic interlocutor between the two powers—indeed, Henry Kissinger played the role quite prominently after leaving office.

China under the Communist Party is the world’s most impressive pioneer at using the amazing new tools available to humanity for utterly repressive and wildly effective totalitarian control.

It is possible to defend Kissinger on the grounds that in the 1970s, there was a clear strategic rationale for embracing China in order to disadvantage the Soviet Union, and that for the next several decades—albeit with an enormous amount of squinting to avoid the eye lingering on events like Tiananmen Square—one could claim that China was on the path to a more open future. All the squinting in the world wouldn’t be enough to mount such a defense when it comes to Xi Jinping’s China.

But it isn’t Allison’s apparent comfort at being used as a tool of propaganda and psychological warfare by America’s adversary that grates most. It is that his theory is deeply misleading on the merits. The risks of confrontation and the fact that war could be its result are mere elementary commonplaces—irresponsibly transformed into something like a universal principle and cleverly marketed by attaching to this principle the name of Thucydides. (By the way, whatever the qualities of Allison’s book, evidence of having actually read Thucydides is not among them.)

What doesn’t get enough mention in Allison’s efforts to promote his notion of the Thucydides Trap are the risks of accommodation. No one knows what the human future holds, but most would agree that the disorienting pace of the digital revolution and the human movement into space indicate we are at some kind of pivotal moment for the species. China under the Communist Party is the world’s most impressive pioneer at using the amazing new tools available to humanity for utterly repressive and wildly effective totalitarian control—the increasingly complete dominance of the state over the individual, paired with an aggressive foreign policy that seeks old-fashioned territorial expansion and a new global system where China calls the shots. Resisting the coming of that world does indeed risk war, and it is no unserious business. But accepting it risks slavery.

Thucydides, a much less reductive author than you might think from reading Allison, would appreciate the terrible complexity and danger of the moment.