

Critical feedback is valuable for the Thucydides's Trap Project, and we will continue to post responses that advance the conversation. We have received hundreds of comments since launching this website in 2015-selections are posted here.


The Thucydides’s Trap Case File (below) presents summaries of all sixteen cases, which are featured in Graham Allison's new book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? Using the cases, Allison illustrates how tension between rising and ruling powers has often led to war-while also showing how war was avoided in the four rivalries that did not end in violence. Twelve of these sixteen rivalries ended in war. Reviewing the past five hundred years, the Harvard Thucydides’s Trap Project has identified sixteen cases in which a major rising power has threatened to displace a major ruling power.
