constrained; recriminations mounted, and hostility reached a new level.3 Does all this mean that China and the United States are headed for what Harvard professor Graham Allison called the “Thucydides Trap”? Named for the ancient Athenian military historian, the concept depicts the risk of war arising from the collision between a “dominant” power and a “rising” power. The many examples begin with the war in the fifth century BC between “dominant” Athens and “rising” Sparta, which Thucydides chronicled. It went on for thirty years and left both city-states devastated.
