In the last few years, one IR theory has resonated profusely among Western academics and political observers: Thucydides’ trap. This theory, which American scholar Graham Allison notably formulated, allegedly captures the current US-Chinese competition comparing it to the confrontation between Athens and Sparta that in 431 B.C. resulted in the Peloponnesian War which Greek historian Thucydides, the father of political history, immortalized in his History. This thesis has been discussed at lengths from different angles, often it has been accepted as a fact, sometimes it has been rebuked as underlying a distorted and simplistic use of Classical Antiquity.^Footnote1 As several other theories coming from Harvard and other renowned American institutions, Allison’s intuition has become public domain.^Footnote2 Considering that it has been shown how Allison’s notion is based on a misleading translation that distorts the content of Thucydides’ sentence he used as well as the ancient Greek context (Lee 2019; Maritan 2024), the ubiquity of Thucydides’ trap across academia, journalism, and policymaking may appear problematic to those scholars concerned with the politics of knowledge production. Hence, its popularity and proximity to policymaking makes a further reconsideration of Thucydides’ trap warranted.

While several observers and policymakers use Thucydides’ trap to explain interstate relations and security issues in East Asia, these pages contend that the popularity of the notion has more to do with America’s Gramscian cultural hegemony (hence the question of the politics of knowledge production) and a distinct form of chauvinism based on the appropriation of a political system, a particular strand of democracy, that has been used to legitimize the global reach of the US.^Footnote3 Thus, structural theories of interstate relations, this paper suggests, need to be read in the context of ideology, in particular the Wilsonian narrative that makes the American presence in East Asia (and beyond) not the result of imperialist encroachments but the natural consequence of a benign power driven by a messianic drive for the benefit of mankind.

Allison’s interpretation of Thucydides, whereby a rising power threatens to displace a hegemonic power (Athens and Sparta respectively, according to Allison) and military confrontation is often inevitable, has now been borrowed in China, a fact that shows the appeal of Thucydides’ trap (Chan 2021; Clark 2020; Gries and Jing 2019; Huang 2017; Ying 2016). Allison’s Destined for War was a Sunday Times and Financial Times book of the year in 2017, with President Biden describing Allison as “one of the keenest observers of international affairs around. He consistently brings his deep understanding of history’s currents to today’s most difficult challenges and makes our toughest foreign policy dilemmas accessible to experts and everyday citizens alike.” (Wang 2023) What is worrying is not that the notion is flawed, but that it is taken as a geopolitical fact (see Moore 2017; Zoellick 2013) and risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, since it has been adopted by the two contending parties to rationalize their rivalry (Chan 2018, 2021; Er 2016).

This paper maintains that Thucydides’ trap became popular as an expression of American beliefs in the “manifest destiny” of the US, which coincided with the fin-de-siècle rise of the US as an overseas empire and was enshrined and legitimized in Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric. It was thus formulated at the right time, not because it captured the historical conjunction it analyzed, but because it portrayed events the ways its power of reference wanted them to be seen.^Footnote4 This discussion focuses on a key security question and great power competition, yet it may not appeal to scholars of security studies, since it addresses the Sino-American rivalry from a perspective that may well be considered heterodoxic within IR and thus dismissed as nonempirical. My argument is not based on any of the main schools of thought within IR theory, but on intellectual history, political theory, and the study nationalism as an ideology (and not as nationality or national culture, contrary to Anderson and several scholars following him), through engagement with several thinkers whose ideas have not become a mainstay of IR theory.

This article, problematizing Thucydides’ trap as originating from concerns that are rooted in notions of national greatness, pushes for an engagement across the study of nationalism, political theory, and international relations, as “the phenomenon [of nationalism] remains more commonly debated in political sociology and history than in IR” (Lerner 2022, 995). Conversely, IR theories, like Thucydides’ trap, have seldom been discussed as expressions of nationalist understandings of politics among states (as forms of chauvinism, slightly distinct from nationalism as a homogenizing force in domestic affairs, that is Mazzini’s “theory of nationality” that Lord Acton found so dangerous for the preservation of multi-ethnic societies and local forms of life) or within nationalism studies. This article integrates Allison’s notion into the study of nationalism by resorting to scholars who have been omitted in recent discussions of the use of Thucydides in IR or of Thucydides’ trap itself.

By demonstrating that Thucydides’ trap significantly draws on Huntington’s belief in the unbridgeable chasm between Western and Chinese civilizations and is based on an imprecise translation that makes Thucydides fit common identifications of his work with realism, this discussion seeks to prove the inconsistencies of that part of Western academic discourse that matches political legitimations of the US–China rivalry by relying on US nationalist narratives and appropriations of the Classical past. Yet to blame the US for the East Asian stalemate, as Daniel Bell and Weng Pei (2020, 139) do, arguing that “if the United States genuinely wants to avoid war in the East Asian region, it should try to accommodate and make concessions to China’s desire to establish a regional hierarchy with itself at the head of the table,” whereby South Korea should accept the loss of its full sovereignty, since, as they argue, “sometimes less powerful countries need to make the best of less-than-ideal solutions,” is to pay lip service to Chinese revanchism offering a “realist” understanding of interstate relations from the perspective of China’s supposed “national interest,” namely “the development of an East Asian tianxia hierarchy led by China.”^Footnote5 Yet this but boils down to Thrasymachus’ paradox found in Plato’s Republic, whereby power is cloaked under the subtle pretext of justice (Maritan 2024).

While Elie Kedourie (1960, 64) underpinned the distinctions between nationalism and patriotism–often dismissed in nationalism studies as untenable, since it is considered to be based on the normative distinction between “my patriotism, your nationalism,” when patriotism, historically, well precedes nationalism—he did not consider attachment to American institutions to imply a form of nationalism. He argued that it is.

loose and inexact to speak […] of British or American nationalism when describing the thought of those who recommend loyalty to British or American political institutions. A British or an American nationalist would have to define the British or the American nation in terms of language, race, or religion, to require that all those who conform to the definition should belong to the British or American state.

This paper precisely argues that American “patriotism” is nationalist in its exaltation of the American nation in ideological, and therefore religious, terms and the merging of the “essence” of being American with a distinct creed, as Hans Kohn (1957) showed. Contrary to Kohn, though, it argues that the American “creedal” nationalism to which he referred is not that different from other nationalisms in the creation of myths that do not hold in light of historiography or political theory, the conviction in the “national destiny” of one’s own country, and the firm belief in or acritical acceptance of doctrines that are considered to be integral to belonging to “the nation,” with Thucydides’ trap being the latest notable theory informed by, and in turn legitimizing, such beliefs.

This article is organized as follows: first it introduces the notion of Thucydides’ trap, showing why it is misleading. Then, it seeks to explain in what respect this theory is an expression of a distinct form of American chauvinism, steeped in stereotyped Wilsonian narratives about popular sovereignty. Section three and four enlarge on the idea that Thucydides’ trap is based on chauvinistic premises. This part is followed by a theoretical discussion that tries to assess whether Wilsonianism really represents lofty principles, and eventually addresses the paradoxical symbiosis of democracy with empire, showing how the American democratic creed originates from a Jeffersonian misappropriation of the republican tradition that swept Montesquieu and the Federalist aside through distortions that made majority rule, not responsible government, the mainstay of US political life. The closing section ties Allison’s abuses of Classical Antiquity and stereotyped repetitions of the sanctity of popular sovereignty as expressions of a chauvinism premised on legitimizing the global reach of the US.

Allison’s notion is based on ideological premises that, as this paper argues, reflect an exceptional form of American chauvinism rooted in the Wilsonian belief in America’s role as champion of “freedom and democracy.” As Allison (2017b, 84) himself stated, “for Americans, democracy is the only just form of government: authorities derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.” This “democratic chauvinism,” typical of Wilson’s doctrine, was yet based on the imperialist “civilizing mission,” whereby “inferior” peoples had to be tutored into the arts of governments, as Wilson (1902) clearly stated during the conflict that led to the US annexation of the Philippines in 1902. This mindset has been integral to the narrative of US administrations, even when bolstering anti-Communist military dictatorships from Latin America to East Asia in the name of “democracy, human rights, and freedom.” Allison (2017b, 84) exemplified the unshaken belief in this trope, stating that “over the decades, Washington has pursued a foreign policy that seeks to advance the cause of democracy—even, on occasion, attempting to impose it on those who have failed to embrace it themselves.”

Kissinger (1994, 804), a key figure of the paradoxical promotion of democracy through the support of military dictatorships, well summarized the sense of triumphalism found among the American public, and famously expressed by Fukuyama in his famed End of History, as the belief whereby “by the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, Wilsonianism seemed triumphant.” Accordingly, President Clinton claimed that “in a new era of peril and opportunity, our overriding purpose must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.” (Kissinger 1994, 805) Similarly, in his initial support of the invasion of Iraq, Fukuyama (2004a) wrote about America’s “ability not just to win wars but to help create self-sustaining democratic political institutions and robust market-oriented economies,” promoting American capitalist democracy abroad.^Footnote6 Allison’s theory is informed by similar Wilsonian notions steeped in the uniqueness of the US, while also being based on transplanting Huntington’s civilizational allegiances to the context of US-Chinese relations, confirming America’s beliefs in its noble ideals against an incompatible value system (Allison 2017a, b).^Footnote7 According to Allison (2017b, 81), “in the case of the United States and China, Thucydidean risks are compounded by civilizational incompatibility between the two countries, which exacerbates their competition and makes it more difficult to achieve rapprochement.” This Huntingtonian component of Allison’s thought is usually overlooked in discussions of Thucydides’ trap. And while Huntington (1996, 316) argued that “in the coming era, […] the avoidance of major intercivilizational wars requires core states to refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations [, …] a truth which some states, particularly the United States, will undoubtedly find difficult to accept,” pushing for a restraint foreign policy, he was as adamant an endorser of the spread of market-based democracies (Huntington 1991).

Whatever the differences between these works, their distinct similarities beg the following question: what are their ideological underpinnings as expressions of US power? Messianic Wilsonianism, which coincides with the belief in the role of the US to make the world “safe for democracy,” as Wilson (1918, 195) famously put it in 1917—in short to export America’s own political system abroad—and the notion of US exceptionalism as a civilization founded on lofty “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, […][which] often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures,” (Huntington 1996, 42), a conviction that informs Allison’s views on the unbridgeable differences between the US and China, make for a distinct form of nationalism.^Footnote8 As axioms, that is as uncontested guiding principles of foreign policy, beliefs in American exceptionalism are integral to Thucydides’ trap, which shows the extent of the inconsistency of such ideological assumptions, cloaked in seemingly profound historical analogies, which yet are “superficial, oversimplified, overconfident,” as Jonathan Kirshner (2018, 12), perhaps too harshly, assessed Allison’s work. And their simplicity and popularity may be ascribed to what Anderson (1983, 5) called the “philosophical poverty” of nationalism tied to its accessibility across the public.^Footnote9

Thucydides’ trap is an invention that, as most nationalist tropes, impinges present-day dynamics and issues on the past, in this case ancient Greece. It is informed by beliefs in US exceptionalism, which was symptomatic of the jingoism of part of US public opinion in the late nineteenth century, and which was expressed by Theodore Roosevelt’s belief in America’s “manifest destiny,” which Wilson endorsed as early as 1901. And it is symptomatic of the tendency among part of the American intelligentsia to devise seemingly nuanced theories that legitimize America’s “manifest destiny.”

Allison’s trap is based on Americano-centric perspectives steeped in the messianic role of the US as promoter of “freedom” and “democracy,” typical of American slogans even before the onset of what came to be known as Wilsonianism, as can be seen in Franklin Henry Giddings’ (1901, 11–12) emphasis on the compatibility of democracy with empire, “the democratic empire,” “that empire which the United States is destined to create, and which we hope may, in the coming centuries, be as strong, as free, as broad as any that the world has ever seen,” as he stated in the context of American early expansion into the Pacific. This rhetoric, based on the sanctity of popular sovereignty, has been constitutive of America’s Wilsonian nationalism throughout the twentieth century;^Footnote10 it either shows the unique character of American nationalism, insofar as it is based on seemingly sophisticated theories, or, on the contrary, the weakness of such theories, which stand as the American counterpart of the construction of national genealogies and primordial myths that are integral to other nationalisms throughout the globe.

According to Allison, his endorsers and most critics, Thucydides’ trap can be gleaned from Thucydides’ words. Yet the ancient Greek historian never wrote the words Allison attributes to him (Morley 2020b). Allison (2015) argued that “the Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece.” The sentence in question is only one, from which Allison (2017a, b, vii) derives his Thucydides’ trap: “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” First, metaphors are a figure of speech, and here there is only a comparison that Allison draws between present-day and past contexts. Secondly, the ancient Greek context was different. Athens was not a rising power, and Sparta was not the hegemonic power: the two city-states were both the leading powers in the Greek world. Finally, and more importantly, the key sentence from Thucydides (2006, 81) that Allison used to come up with his Thucydides’ trap is different in the translation on which Allison had worked: “The truest cause, but the one least spoken about openly, I consider to be the Athenians’ growing power and the fear they caused [by this growth] to the Lacedaemonians.” The original Greek for the Athenians’ growing power runs as follows, “τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ἡγοῦμαι μεγάλους γιγνομένους” (tous Athenaious egoumai megalous gignomenous), which is different from a simple “rise.”^Footnote11 Even in Hobbes’ (1843, 93) seventeenth-century translation, Thucydides referred to “the Lacedaemonians [giving] sentence that the peace was broken and that war was to be made […] for fear the Athenian greatness should still increase. For they saw that a great part of Greece was fallen already into their hands.”

Although Hobbes’ translation was edited and revisited by Molesworth in the nineteenth century, the meaning of Thucydides’ words was not altered, contrary to what Allison did with Crawley’s translation, when he changed “the growth of the power of Athens” into “the rise of Athens,” thus distorting the original meaning, making the ancient Greek context fit his interpretation of present-day geopolitics.^Footnote12 In his commentary to Thucydides, then Oxford Fellow Marchant (1905, 172) made it clear that it is about the “growing greatness of Athens,” not a simple rise, while pointing to other passages where Thucydides refers to “the Athenian greatness,” which had come into being in the intervening 50 years since the Persian wars (Pentacontaetia). The original Greek for the supposed “rise” is μεγάλους γιγνομένους (megalous gignomenous), which yet refers to Athens growing ever more, not to a simple rise. Hobbes’ (1843) translation reflects this “growing greatness,” which does not imply a mere rise or the fact that Athens was less powerful than Sparta: “and the truest quarrel, though least in speech, I conceive to be the growth of the Athenian power, which putting the Lacedaemonians into fear necessitated the war.”

Most critics of Thucydides’ trap fall in the same trap as Allison, since they rely on his flawed translation. According to Allison (2015), “Thucydides told a story of fear. ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.’” But this is Allison’s inaccurate adaptation of an English translation from the ancient Greek. As Allison (2017a, b, 297) stated, he had “adapted [translations] to more modern English syntax,” in what is a misleading practice that distorts the actual meaning of Thucydides’ words.

Critics use Allison’s adaptation attributing his words to Thucydides. Gross Stein (2022) writes about “the increasingly granular debate over whether the trap identified by the great historian, Thucydides, speaks to contemporary policy issues” and “the story Thucydides tells of the fear a hegemon experiences as it contemplates a rising challenger.” Yet the only time Gross Stein references Thucydides directly, the sentence is Allison’s adaptation (for similar examples see Yoder 2019 and Zhang 2019). Similarly, Tooze (2021) repeats this inaccurate translation when he writes that “the ancient historian saw war with Sparta as an inevitable consequence of Athens’s growing power.” Analogous misinterpretations can be found among the leading contributors to the Financial Times. Tett (2021) wrote: “Allison argued—as Thucydides himself first noted—that whenever a ruling power is challenged by a fast-rising rival, it traps them in a pattern that can easily spark war,” while Rachman (2018) reasoned that “it remains open to question whether patterns of state behaviour that emerged in ancient Greece will still prevail in the nuclear age.” Yet Thucydides argued all this only if we rely on Allison’s flawed adaptation of the English translation. Leteiner (2006, 744), in his commentary to Thucydides, stated that “Thucydides devotes a long excursus to the growth of Athenian power (1.89–117). He may be right that Athenian power and imperial intentions reached such intensity that the Spartans in fear thought they had to stop them soon—or never. Thucydides is not a determinist. Nowhere does he assert that the war was “inevitable,” a dangerous word for cool heads,” showing well before the invention of Thucydides’ trap (Allison’s, not Wouk’s) that the whole debate around Thucydides’ trap is inconsistent at the core.

It may be contended that discussing Allison’s interpretation of Thucydides is an arcane historiographical and philological debate of little theoretical and policy relevance. Yet understanding how Thucydides’ trap is an invention rooted in persistent Wilsonian beliefs in US exceptionalism helps underscore the extent to which structural dynamics of interstate relations are often framed in ways that take for granted that the US is driven by lofty principles, whereby “freedom” is coupled with “democracy” in typical Freedom House terms (see, for example, Tilly 2007). That a rising power with revanchist ambitions may be a threat to a hegemonic power does not make Thucydides’ trap real; it shows how the drive for power is integral to understandings of international relations, as Morgenthau (1948, 7–8) showed considering “the aspiration for power of sovereign nations [… the] moving force [of world politics],” for which Thucydides’ History is seen as an early example (Garst 1989). Yet Thucydides’ trap is a further interpretation of structural dynamics of power, based on misleading notions and abuses of the past. It is the way structural dynamics are used by Allison that is of interest to the political theorist and historian of ideas.

While the realist and neoliberal schools of thought share in “the assumption that the absence of a sovereign authority that can make and enforce binding agreements creates opportunities for states to advance their interests unilaterally and makes it important and difficult for states to cooperate with one another” (Jervis 1999, 43), seemingly confirming the core of Thucydides’ trap, Allison’s abuse of Thucydides taps into neoconservative and hegemonic realist beliefs in the US role as guarantor of world destinies, integral to nationalist understandings of the American nation. By creating a structural parallel between Ancient Greece and contemporary East Asia, Allison offers a monocausal explanation of war rooted in structural dynamics of power that dismiss questions of human agency and ideology (Chan 2019), the latter in turn creating these same interpretations.

As to his critics, Allison (2017a, b, 287) wrote that “in academic debate, scholars frequently prefer to attack straw men rather than contest a stated thesis […] [and that] critics have repeatedly incinerated the same straw men.” One of these is selection bias, which Chan (2020) pointed out. Yet to emphasize the question of translation and invention (see Lee 2019; Maritan 2024) is not a straw man, since attacking straw men implies attacking distorted versions of others’ arguments, not the actual argument: Thucydides did not state the words Allison attributes to him. This invention shows how even supposedly subtle interpretations of the US role in world politics are based on as simplistic (albeit more elaborate) and distorting interpretations as other nationalisms.

Relying on Huntington’s (1991) description of Confucianism, whereby Confucianism is seen as antithetical to Western culture and its undemocratic nature is considered problematic, while Confucian meritocracy and rulers’ accountability are dismissed, Allison (2017a, b) shows his indebtedness to Huntington’s Americano-centrism and Sinophobia—the intellectual premises for Thucydides’ trap—stating:

the general sturdy strands of Chinese culture […] have persisted through the centuries. What is more, they provide pointers to ways in which it is distinct, and in some ways incompatible, with the cultures of Western nations like the United States. Being overtaken by a rival who shares common values—such as Britain grudgingly watching an upstart America surpass its power but largely preserve its cultural, religious, and political beliefs—is one thing. It would be quite another to be surpassed by an adversary whose values are so strikingly different.

American anxieties over the relative loss of prestige of US power and waning influence abroad are tied to the rise of China, with “US resistance to the loss of power and prestige” being one of the possible factors shaping East Asian geopolitics, according to Arrighi (1998, 75). Kissinger (1994, 36) addressed these worries stating that “by the time of the Monroe Doctrine’s centennial, its meaning had been gradually expanded to justify American hegemony in the Western hemisphere. […] The Monroe Doctrine justified American intervention not only against an existing threat but against any possibility of an overt challenge.”^Footnote13

Anxieties over American primacy as voiced by Allison underlie a concern that is essentially nationalist, expressed through theories that, similarly to other nationalist narratives, fall in gross pitfalls, in this case a wrong translation that abuses anachronistically ancient Greek history. Emphasizing Allison’s translation is no mere philological pedantry. Instead of being interpreted for what it tells, the past is manufactured and tailored to fit present-day purposes, as with other nationalisms. The purpose of such interpretations is to make sense of challenges to the global role of the US and ensuing possible power transition, which for Allison, as for Huntington earlier, in the East Asian context consist of the Chinese challenge to US hegemony in the region. This hegemony is justified also by Allison in typically Wilsonian terms, in the idea that, notwithstanding the impossibility of making democracy universal, the US has been the champion of the political system, democracy.

Yet even the original Wilsonianism, based on “making the world safe for democracy,” dismissed the non-Western world as the backstage of Western powers, showing the extent to which Western double standards were ingrained even among those who were considered, misleadingly, progressive (Manela 2006, 1344). As a coeval and vocal critic of Wilson, David Jayne Hill (1920, 593) captured Wilson’s paradox, still present in Allison’s and other American scholars’ beliefs, as “the trailing mantle of Mr. Wilson’s apostolate of peace through the pledge of war.” And this has proved to be the pattern of US foreign policy for almost a century, namely a fight for hegemony cloaked in a rhetoric of spreading democracy for the benefit of mankind. Little mattered that in the process the US would replace democratically elected governments with military dictators, a practice legitimized by security concerns for the “free” world.^Footnote14 As Huntington (1996, 313) put it three decades ago in ways preceding the core of Thucydides’ Trap, “the emergence of China as the dominant power in East and Southeast Asia would be contrary to American interests as they have been historically construed. Given this American interest, how might war between the United States and China develop?” The invention of Thucydides’ trap and its popularity are premised on such “historically construed” American interests in East Asia, which are imperial legacies originating from America’s “manifest destiny,” whereby, as Wilson (1902, 734) himself stated, the twentieth century would be “the century that shall see [the US] a great power in the world,” a nation, as he said a few years later, in 1915, “that knows that it must command the respect of the world.” (Wilson 1918, 94).