Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
Graham Allison. First published 2017.
Reviewed by GPIL Editorial · October 2026
Graham Allison's book begins with one sentence from an ancient historian. Thucydides wrote that it was the rise of Athens, and the fear this caused in Sparta, that made war inevitable. Allison calls this pattern "Thucydides's Trap": the danger that arises when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one.
With colleagues at Harvard he looked at the last five hundred years and found sixteen cases in which this happened. Twelve of them ended in war. The question of the book is whether the United States and China will be the seventeenth case, and on which side of that count they will fall.
The book is at its best when it insists that war between great powers is not fated, and at its weakest when it treats everyone else as scenery.
What the book does well. Allison writes for people who must make decisions, and he is clear. He shows how wars begin that nobody planned: through an ally's quarrel, an accident at sea, a leader who cannot be seen to step back. His four cases without war are the most useful part of the book, because they show what restraint required of each side. In each of them, somebody had to accept less than they believed they were owed.
Where it has been questioned. Historians have challenged how the sixteen cases were chosen and whether some of them fit the pattern at all. A list of this kind depends on where the author draws the line, and a different line gives a different score. Readers should take the count as an illustration of a danger, not as a law of history.
What it leaves out. This is where we read the book differently. In Allison's account there are two actors, and the rest of the world waits for the result. But Thucydides himself tells a fuller story. The Peloponnesian War did not begin in Athens or in Sparta. It began in the quarrels of smaller cities, and in the choices their larger allies made about them. The small states were where the war started, and they paid the most for it.
That is the lesson we would draw for our own time. The peace between great powers is kept or lost in the places between them: in the island states, the straits and the border towns where their interests meet. A reader in Washington or Beijing will find a warning in this book. A reader in a small state will find something else: a reason to keep several friendships in good repair, and to speak up early.
Who should read it. Anyone who works in diplomacy, defence or peacebuilding, and students who want to understand how the present rivalry is discussed in the capitals that matter. Read it with the history beside it, and with the question the author does not ask: what can those who are not great powers do to keep the peace?
GPIL book reviews consider one book at a time for what it can teach those who work for peace. The views expressed are those of the Institute's editorial team.