Destined For War: Can America And China Escape ... May 2026

In his influential 2017 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? , Harvard scholar Graham Allison warns that the United States and China are on a collision course. While he stresses that , he argues that historical structural forces make it much more likely than most leaders acknowledge. The Core Concept: Thucydides’s Trap

: China’s rapid economic ascent is unparalleled—surpassing the U.S. in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)—while the U.S. maintains a "DNA to be Number One".

: Named after the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who observed that the Peloponnesian War was caused by "the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta".