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Trump and Xi, take note: The United States and China risk falling into a trap over tariffs.

By MAX BOOT

Washington Post
April 14, 2025

In 2014, eminent political scientist Graham Allison published an influential book called “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” The subtitle referred to a famous passage in Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”

Allison surveyed the history of the past 500 years and found 16 cases in which a major nation’s rise has disrupted the position of a dominant state. In 12 of those instances, the result was war. And that includes two of the most horrific conflicts in history: World War I was caused in no small part by the rise of Imperial Germany, while World War II was caused by the rise of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Allison sounded an alarm that another conflict was brewing because the rise of China was threatening U.S. hegemony. There was nothing inevitable about a U.S.-China conflict, he wrote in 2014, but the odds were that one would eventually erupt.

I’ve been thinking about Allison’s warning now that President Donald Trump has launched a trade war against China. (Allison told me on Friday that he has been “hearing the same echoes” of his own warning.)