Asian AngleThe Thucydides Trap is a lie created to justify a US-China war
Ancient Greece offers no lessons for Asia. The Global South must stop letting America’s war machine write history
From Washington to Brussels and even Asia, policymakers have become obsessed with the “Thucydides Trap”, a concept born from Graham Allison’s Destined for War, published in 2017.
We are endlessly warned that whenever a rising power challenges the hegemon, war is almost inevitable. This is convenient and lazy.
Allison, who served in the Reagan and Clinton administrations and has advised successive secretaries of defence – credentials that travel well through the propaganda channels of political elites on both sides of the Atlantic – himself argued the trap could be escaped. What Washington heard, however, was not the caveat. It was permission.
Destined for War has been sold as historical wisdom, but it is a political narrative dressed up as scholarship that normalises conflict triggered by Western military and economic interests. It invites us to sleepwalk into accepting confrontation as destiny rather than scrutinise the choices driving today’s tensions. That scrutiny would expose inconvenient truths about hegemony, resource grabs and a barely concealed disdain for others based on race and religion.
Why are we being forced to look at the 21st century through a 2,500-year-old lens of Greek city state warfare? Why are Athens and Sparta – the stuff of Hollywood – rather than the accumulated experience of Asia, Africa or Latin America, elevated as the definitive guide to the future, as if they are a law of physics? This is not just Western-centric. It is deliberately misleading.