The Thucydides Trope: China Is No Match for America

Western analysts and leaders who accept the PRC’s propaganda misunderstand reality.

 

For some time, it has been fashionable to discuss relations between the U.S. and China in the context of the “Thucydides Trap,” popularized by Harvard University’s Graham Allison. In a Financial Times column in 2012, Allison cited this line from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” He singled out “rise” and “fear” as the operative elements in determining whether war between China and the U.S. can be avoided. The analysis has been referenced countless times since, including last month when China’s President Xi Jinping welcomed President Trump by asking: “Can China and the United States transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”

 

Allison’s framework reflected the elite consensus at the time that the People’s Republic of China was a nation on the rise. The PRC had joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and had become one of the world’s low-cost manufacturers by simultaneously taking advantage of WTO membership to dump government-induced overproduced goods while violating WTO rules with import restrictions, ongoing government subsidies in every sector, and intellectual property theft. Chinese annual GDP growth since 2001 had averaged more than 10 percent.

 

Meanwhile, the U.S. was emerging from a financial crisis, with military forces entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan. China was getting restive in the Pacific, challenging Japan and the Philippines with expansive claims of territorial rights in the region. India’s former chief economist Arvind Subramanian even projected the possibility of the renminbi becoming the world’s reserve currency possibly within the next decade. Subramanian’s 2011 book, Eclipse, had on its cover a photo of Barack Obama appearing to bow in greeting to an upright President Hu Jintao. At least to some, China seemed to be the rising power.

 

Whether or not the premise was accurate in 2012, to invoke it now is to willfully ignore reality. Since then, Xi Jinping has held a repressive grip on power. The communist leadership leads with paranoia, desperately afraid of its own citizens. There was the crackdown in Hong Kong against openness and dissent, the crisis of zero-Covid that led to social upheaval in Chinese cities, the collapse of the massive real estate bubble, and ensuing socioeconomic malaise. It is hard to buy into the fallacy of a Chinese juggernaut. In the words of Hoover Institution scholar Frank Dikötter, “Chinese communism is still communism.” President Trump may not be bowing to Xi Jinping, but his frequent references to Xi as a peer in what Trump terms the “G2” play right into Xi’s propaganda campaign to convince the world that China has equal status to the U.S. and should be seen as a counterparty in managing the world’s major issues.

 

China is not on the rise, and for Western analysts and government leaders to accept PRC propaganda is to misunderstand reality. Elite opinion shapers had previously convinced themselves that membership in the WTO would lead Chinese communism to succumb to capitalism and democratic reforms. From those same quarters, we now hear that the PRC is an emerging superpower and confrontation should be avoided at any cost. Elite opinion has been wrong on the PRC for about as long as there has been a PRC, and it is wrong today. China cannot sustain a centrally planned, Marxist-Leninist economy for the long run. China cannot match the U.S. in warfighting capacity or in alliances and partnerships. There is zero likelihood that communist China will achieve superiority in either area.

 

Where Beijing does have superpower status is in propaganda. The repetition by Western analysts of canards like the Thucydides Trap reflects China’s propaganda effectiveness. The Chinese Communist Party has government departments and agencies with “propaganda” in their titles. It exports its propaganda through lavish spending on academic research in the United States and Europe. Its diplomats engage in propaganda at think tanks and the media. China propaganda has persuaded the world that it is a power on the rise, dominant in key technologies, and unstoppable. The Thucydides Trap framework fits China’s narrative to a tee.

 

Gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and electric vehicles, together with phony government statistics and massive government spending, distract the world from the many challenges the country faces. Evidence of these challenges abounds. Overbuilding of real estate over many years created a housing bubble that led to ghost cities and communities with millions of shoddy unsold housing units. The urban middle class are retrenching as the wealth effect of those investments has evaporated. Total debt in China is about four times its GDP. Debt-fueled overproduction goes well beyond housing. Consider the solar panel industry. China leads the world in production and is dumping them into foreign markets. A drop in demand is leading to loss of revenues and bankruptcies, calling for yet more government subsidies. Other government infrastructure projects include underused airports, redundant freeways, and super-subsidized high-speed rail to nowhere. These are draining government coffers. China’s GDP growth may be zero or even negative in real terms — official statistics are untrustworthy. Consumption is low and declining. According to China’s own data, foreign direct investment was down by more than half between 2022 and 2025. The risks of investing have risen because of intellectual property theft and Chinese government intrusion in corporate affairs. Trade surpluses are under pressure; protectionism and antidumping responses to China by countries around the world are on the rise. Government spending cannot offset these negative impacts to GDP.

 

There are grave social challenges, too. The underdevelopment of human capital has been a hallmark of the communist regime since its beginning. The decades-long one-child policy and limited access to general education make it unlikely that China has the future productive capacity to break free of its middle-income status on a per capita basis. After the devastations they faced during war and poverty in the first half of the 20th century, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and other Asian societies prioritized education for all their citizens and emerged prosperous and democratic. Compared with the 80 percent or more of school-age children who receive a full secondary education in many of these countries, China’s own statistics (certainly overstated) show that only about a quarter of the Chinese population has made it through the sixth grade. Only 10 percent of the declining Chinese population has a four-year university degree; in the U.S., it is 40 percent. By the end of this decade, the average Chinese worker will be 42 years old. In 20 years or sooner, the average worker’s age will be 50.

 

These are not the characteristics of a rising power. There is opportunity for some, but it is concentrated in the cities. Even so, urban college-educated unemployment is more than 20 percent. In rural areas, hundreds of millions live on a few dollars a day, living lives only somewhat better than those of the rural Chinese when communism took hold in 1949. GDP per capita on a purchasing power parity basis is a fifth of Singapore’s, lagging Malaysia’s and Turkey’s and ranking between 70th and 80th overall in the world. Having sown the seeds of self-diminishment through decades of Marxist leadership, China faces inexorable decline.

 

Those who think that the U.S. and China are locked in head-to-head competition have to ignore a lot to get there. In terms of access to opportunity and prosperity for the average citizen, the U.S. is far ahead. It boasts deep capital markets to finance innovation and the world’s best university system, which is driving the global knowledge economy. The dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. Comparisons of GDP are revealing. When the Thucydides Trap analysis took hold in 2012, China’s GDP was about half that of the U.S. By 2020, it had risen to 70 percent. Since Covid, the real estate collapse, and the other challenges that have become too obvious to ignore, China is falling behind. In 2025, China’s GDP as a percentage of U.S. GDP had slid to about 63 percent.

 

Finally, consider the military balance. China is making real gains in military capabilities. It is building ships, aircraft, strategic nuclear forces, and hypersonic missiles. But military power goes beyond things that can be counted. A great deal of Chinese defense spending is simply government stimulus, similar to its unused high-speed rail and highway projects. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if the military systems China is developing don’t work as advertised or face challenges analogous to its shoddy infrastructure, which have resulted in collapsed bridges and in highways that have disappeared into sinkholes.

 

Worse, China’s military officer and enlisted corps face the same challenges as the broader society — low levels of education and a culture in which initiative or risk-taking are not rewarded and often punished. In the Communist Party–driven system, officers and the senior enlisted are trained not to think and adapt but to obey or suffer the consequences. Xi is purging the senior officer corps for corruption, lack of confidence, and perceived disloyalty. This won’t help independent thinking and adaptability. U.S. forces at every level are disciplined and ingenious. The senior officer and enlisted ranks are battle-hardened. Expertise in joint and allied operations, logistics, and every aspect of the military arts is broad and deep. China has not seen combat since its skirmish with Vietnam almost a half century ago, during which Chinese military forces demonstrated operational inadequacies and withdrew within a month.

 

Just as it is not all bad news for China, it isn’t all positive for the U.S. For example, we must return to a policy of controlled but generous legal immigration to offset flat or declining natural population growth. The national debt is rising, and politics is too consumed with performative officeholding to address the pro-growth and fiscal-restraint policies we need. But we’ve shown adaptability throughout our 250-year history. Our political self-correcting mechanisms remain robust, if we can keep them, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin’s caution.

 

The Peloponnesian War, nearly 500 years before the birth of Christ, doesn’t seem an apt analogue to the dynamic between the U.S. and China today. China and the U.S. do not comport with Athens and Sparta, respectively. Athens was a vibrant, rising commercial power whose future looked brighter than Sparta’s, with its oligarchic leadership and staid rigidity. China is trapped at middle income and dealing with the deleterious consequences of central planning and state-driven capitalism, which are as old as the communist regime. Growth through enlightened immigration policies won’t work because no one is trying to immigrate to China. In fact, Chinese are trying to leave and come to the U.S., which remains vibrant, adaptable, and wealthy. U.S. GDP per capita in 2024 dollars is more than six times China’s.

 

The most obvious proponent of the Thucydides Trap analysis is Xi himself. It advances the goals of China’s influence campaign. The analysis confers prestige onto China and elevates it to peer status with the most powerful, influential country in the world. Journalists repeat it because it creates a sense of crisis and intrigue. What better way to think about a modern relationship between nations than as a repeat of an ancient drama?

 

The Thucydides Trap has become a trope, repeated by those in the West who ignore what is right in front of them and by those in China who benefit from it. What started as a possibly clever insight has hardened into a meaningless cliché. Western governments, business leaders, and analysts expose their misunderstanding of reality and their susceptibility to Chinese propaganda by accepting it as conventional wisdom.

 

*Thérèse Shaheen is a businesswoman and CEO of US Asia International. She was the chairman of the State Department’s American Institute in Taiwan from 2002 to 2004.

 

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/06/the-thucydides-trope-china-is-no-match-for-america/