For some time, it has been fashionable to discuss relations between the U.S. and China in the context of the “Thucydides Trap,” popularized by Harvard University’s Graham Allison. In a Financial Times column in 2012, Allison cited this line from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” He singled out “rise” and “fear” as the operative elements in determining whether war between China and the U.S. can be avoided. The analysis has been referenced countless times since, including last month when China’s President Xi Jinping welcomed President Trump by asking: “Can China and the United States transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”
Allison’s framework reflected the elite consensus at the time that the People’s Republic of China was a nation on the rise. The PRC had joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and had become one of the world’s low-cost manufacturers by simultaneously taking advantage of WTO membership to dump government-induced overproduced goods while violating WTO rules with import restrictions, ongoing government subsidies in every sector, and intellectual property theft. Chinese annual GDP growth since 2001 had averaged more than 10 percent.
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