A Harvard scholar says the Chinese leader sees rivalry with Washington as a path to catastrophic war unless both sides rethink their ties
3-MIN READ3-MIN ListenDewey Simin BeijingPublished: 7:03am, 23 May 2026Updated: 7:05am, 23 May 2026Chinese President Xi Jinping viewed the Thucydides Trap as the “best diagnosis” of the challenge Beijing faces with Washington when he raised the concept with US leader Donald Trump this month, signalling an awareness that their current path risked conflict, an eminent American political scientist said.
“My impression is that he sees this as the best diagnosis of the challenge he and President Trump face,” said Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“He understands that business as usual [and] diplomacy as usual will produce history as usual. And history as usual will be a catastrophic war that neither China nor the US will survive.”
The idea is not new but has gained greater salience in US-China relations as China’s global footprint has expanded.
Xi talked about the theory as early as 2013. In 2015, while he cautioned that major powers “might create such traps for themselves” through mistakes of strategic miscalculation, he insisted that “there is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world”.
