A letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal reframes the popular “Thucydides Trap” analogy, arguing the real lesson for great powers from ancient Greece is not about rising rivals, but the peril of imperial overreach.
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China’s Thucydides debate misses 1 key warning from Athens
A letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal reframes the popular “Thucydides Trap” analogy, arguing the real lesson for great powers from ancient Greece is not about rising rivals, but the peril of imperial overreach.
A single letter to the editor is challenging the dominant framework for analyzing US-China competition, suggesting that both Beijing and Washington may be focusing on the wrong historical lesson from ancient Greece. Published in the Wall Street Journal on May 21, the letter points to the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily as a more relevant warning than the much-cited “Thucydides Trap.”
"But there was another trap described by Thucydides that Mr. Xi might wish to consider: Imagining that they would secure great wealth, the Athenians undertook a risky expedition to conquer the island of Sicily, an expedition that led to utter disaster and ultimately to Athens’ defeat by Sparta—a sharp reminder of the folly of deluded imperial ambitions," wrote Andrew R. Dyck of Los Angeles.
Dyck’s commentary followed a high-stakes summit in Beijing where Chinese President Xi Jinping explicitly asked former US President Donald Trump if their nations could avoid the “Thucydides Trap”—the theory that war is likely when a rising power threatens to displace an established one. The term, popularized by Harvard professor Graham Allison, refers to the Peloponnesian War between a rising Athens and the established power of Sparta, a conflict that the historian Thucydides chronicled.
The intervention shifts the focus from the structural inevitability of conflict to the agency and choices of the powers themselves. Instead of a clash being predetermined by power shifts, Dyck’s chosen analogy suggests that catastrophic failure comes from strategic overconfidence and miscalculation—a warning against what he terms "deluded imperial ambitions." This places the risk not in the rivalry itself, but in the potential for either nation to embark on a disastrous strategic misadventure.
Sparta's Fear vs. Athens' Folly
The "Thucydides Trap" has dominated geopolitical discourse for nearly a decade as a shorthand for the dangers of US-China relations. During the recent Beijing summit, President Xi used the concept to frame the relationship as a structural contest, pressuring the US to grant China equal standing on the world stage to avoid a seemingly pre-ordained conflict. Chinese state media quickly linked the idea to the Taiwan issue, implying that any conflict would be triggered by US interference.
However, Dyck’s letter highlights a different, and arguably more cautionary, episode from Thucydides' history. The Sicilian Expedition (415-413 B.C.) was an unmitigated disaster for Athens. Driven by hopes of easy victory and vast new resources, Athens launched a massive naval invasion of Sicily, vastly underestimating the risks and logistics. The expedition’s complete destruction crippled the Athenian military and treasury, weakening it for its eventual defeat by Sparta. The lesson, in this reading, is not about the fear of the established power, but the hubris of the rising one.
A Summit of Transactional Truces
The context for this debate is a US-China relationship defined by what many analysts called the "Stalemate Summit." The May meeting in Beijing produced no major breakthroughs but achieved a temporary, tactical equilibrium. President Trump secured renewed Chinese commitments on agricultural imports and a joint venture for TikTok, while President Xi secured a delay on new US tariffs and held his firm line on Taiwan.
While both leaders managed to claim short-term wins, the summit underscored the deep-seated suspicion between the two powers. The US delegation took unprecedented cybersecurity precautions following intelligence reports of Chinese campaigns to steal proprietary AI models. For its part, Beijing sought to project stability to global markets while facing its own domestic economic headwinds. The invocation of Thucydides by Xi was a strategic move to position China as a rational actor seeking to avoid conflict, while simultaneously warning the US against crossing its red lines, particularly over Taiwan, which he called the "most important issue in China-U.S. relations."
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
