THE “Thucydides Trap” is a geopolitical concept popularized by the former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Graham Allison. In summary, it is based on an idea from the Athenian historian Thucydides who wrote that “when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound, extreme danger ahead! … It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War).
In Allison’s research covering the past 500 years, he discovered that in 12 out of 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power, the result was war. Now we again witness the emergence of a rising power (China) and a ruling power (the United States); and geopolitical analysts are speculating whether war between China and the US is inevitable following the trend in history of the past half millennium.
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