China’s leader Xi Jinping made a publicity splash this week during the visit to Beijing of US President Donald Trump when he referred to a book titled The Thucydides Trap about the ancient Greek historian’s treatise on war.
The book’s author, Harvard professor Graham Allison, laid out the fears harbored by Sparta, the “incumbent power” at the time, of the “rising power,” Athens, and explained how that underlay decades of warfare between the two.
The “Thucydides trap” transfers the ancient Greek catastrophe to a possibility of a repeat now, Allison contended. War could result due to the rivalry between an “incumbent” US and a “rising” China.
So the Chinese leader lectured his guest on how to avoid a modern day trap: “We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias,” he told Trump. “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world – but, should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”
It was not the first instance in which Xi, who’s been in power for more than 13 years, referenced Allison’s book, but this was the first time he schooled an American president in person on its presumed meaning. And he offered a slightly narrow take: The Thucydides trap is not indelibly imprinted on history but is the result of actions taken by frail human leadership.
Xi’s intervention made waves, not only because he directly lectured Trump, but also because Iran has attracted parallel criticisms in the United States, where the conflict is generally unpopular. In part, the criticism mirrors Xi’s as critics point to indications that the Iran invasion project had grown out of spur-of-the-moment decision-making.
“The real lesson of Thucydides is not that war is preordained,” wrote Andrew Latham, a political science professor at Macalester College in the United States. “But it becomes more likely when nations allow fear to cloud reason, when leaders mistake posturing for prudence and when strategic decisions are driven by insecurity rather than clarity.”
Latham concluded that the trap is the result of “hubris and nemesis” (that is, excessive pride followed by its damaging costs) rather than the inevitable outcome of “structural determinism.”
“Much of this is lost when the phrase “Thucydides trap” is elevated into a kind of quasi-law of international politics,” he said.
Critics of the Iraq war contend that the decision to invade was influenced by the success of two short, unrelated military excursions already ordered by Trump. One was the US bombing of Boko Haram terrorists in northeastern Nigeria late last year. The other took place just over a week later on New Year’s Eve, when American commandoes raided Venezuela, captured dictator Nicolas Maduro and spirited him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.
These episodes somehow encouraged Trump to attempt the overthrow of the tightly controlled Islamic regime in Iran, which is backed by the fanatical “Revolutionary Guard Corps” cohort packed with weaponry and able to mount high-tech guerrilla-style warfare against the enemy, in the view of Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO.
“Having seen the military successfully used in Venezuela and Nigeria, Trump now believes he can use raw power to force political change,” Daalder said in a podcast. “There is a human element to this, which is called hubris. And this president has hubris in his DNA.”
Daalber pointed out that Trump is only the latest in a line of American presidents who launched seemingly limited military adventures abroad that grew long into quests to obtain larger goals—and failed:
- In late 1993, President George H.W. Bush sent troops into Somalia to help feed a starving population caught up in a vicious civil war. The mission morphed into an effort to install a government that would replace a pair of warlords fighting for power. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, one of the warlord, objected and sent his forces to fight the Americans. Less than a year and much chaos later, Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, ordered the withdrawal of US troops.
- In 2001, President George W. Bush, the first Bush’s son, launched an invasion of Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind the 9/11 airline-borne attacks on the US. The invasion was quickly converted into an occupation designed to turn the country into a democracy. US commandos eventually killed Bin Laden who was hiding in Pakistan. The nation-building project lasted 20 years but eventually fell apart. The Islamic Movement of Taliban, the group that had hosted bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist organization and also fought the Americans, returned to power.
- George W. Bush then organized the 2003 invasion of Iraq in hopes of overthrowing dictator Saddam Hussein. The war was launched on the false grounds that Iraq had possessed nuclear weapons. Saddam’s government was quickly ousted and he was eventually captured and executed by hanging. No nuclear arsenal existed. The US subsequently tried to implant stable democratic government in Iraq but the effort provided, instead, unstable and corrupt governments bedeviled by ethnic conflict and violence engendered by guerrilla forces supported by Iran. The project effort remains a “work in progress,” Daalber said.
“Before going to war in the future, US political leaders need to give more careful consideration to how they can leverage the US military to produce a desired outcome,” wrote Max Boot, an international security expert at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. “The lack of such strategy has bee a glaring American shortcoming from the Vietnam War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and now the war in Iran.”
A lack of such consideration appears to have infected Trump’s Iran project. The war was carried out solely with the use of air power. Bombing of military instillations as well as industrial and transport infrastructure was expected to drive the Islamic government quickly out of power.
The failure to achieve that goal hasn’t reduced the Trump Administration appetite for seeming accommplishments it can boast of. Almost three months into the war, Trump boasts of full air superiority and claims that Iran’s entire array of artillery, missile and naval forces were obliterated. His Secretary of War Pete Hegseth rattles off statistics he says show the depth of the American “death and destruction” campaign. US air bombardments destroyed around 13,000 “targets” in March, the first full month of the war, Hegseth said.
General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, boasts that Iran is “toast.”
However, occasional drone and missile attacks by Iran on US bases in the area have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Attacks on US-friendly Persian Gulf allies along with Iran’s continued blockade of the Gulf itself by small Iranian boats have damaged nearby economies and trade worldwide.
The US air-only strategy is novel. Since World War II, planes have been employed not just to destroy infrastructure, but also to clear enemy ground forces out of the path of ground troops and armed vehicles. Trump insists that he will not send ground forces into battle.
“No matter how precise or devastating, air strikes alone cannot topple a government,” wrote Kelly Grieco, a researcher at the Stimson Center, a research institute in Washington. “Iran in 2026 is likely to emerge battered but not broken – a costly example of American hubris and the limits of airpower.”
Grieco belittled Trump’s call for civilians to emerge from their shelters to oppose the government in the midst of warfare. “What strategic bombing campaigns have reliably produced, across a century of evidence, is not rebellion but solidarity,” she said. “Even when populations despise and fear their leaders, they have a powerful tendency, when bombs fall, to close ranks against the external aggressor.”
Observers criticize the failure of Trump to foresee the need to secure the Strait of Hormuz, a prime fossil fuel and commercial trade pathway to the world. Such a blockage had been bandied about by Iranian officials for years. According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, “Plenty of people in the United States military and national security apparatus could have enlightened the White House regarding the scope and modalities of possible Iranian retaliations.”
She added, “Others’ opinions are no match for your own when you live in a bubble of delusions and believe you are omnipotent.”
All this likely pleases Xi, except for the fact that the war has done extensive damage to its ally, and the outcome is yet uncertain.
Xi does not apply Thucydides’s warning to his close ally, Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, and had expected the war to be over in a matter of days, resulting in a takeover the country he says rightfully belongs to Russia.
Xi was perhaps too polite to warn Putin about the dangers of “self-imposed bias” that might create dangerous “traps.” Rather, he and Putin issued a statement about Ukraine that called for “complete elimination” of the “root causes” of the war.
“Root causes” is Putin’s euphemism for a series of Russian complaints that include NATO’s expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries and the efforts to Ukraine to join them and Putin’s insistence that Ukraine is run by Nazis.
In any event, China has been eagerly buying cut-rate Russian crude oil, purchases that help Putin finance the war. Xi also supplies Moscow with scarce military hardware.
Xi took a moment to note that “time and momentum are on our side” in the quest for world influence and power in what he calls a “New Era.” Is Xi maybe also vulnerable to the perils of excessive self-confidence?
A few years ago, a professor at Beijing’s China University of Political Science and Law wrote about the Thucydides trap and noted that it took two to create the disastrous outcome of the war in Greece. It was not only Sparta that made missteps, he pointed out. So did Athens.
He seemed to be casting a warning at China. “Economic success often encourages a rising power to display ambition, confidence and enhanced sense of self (what Allison calls ‘rising power syndrome’), which leads to loosened restraint, overextension, and strategic blunder,” the professor argued.
