Donald Trump will leave China a chastened man.
If he didn’t know what Xi Jinping meant by raising the specter of the Thucydides Trap when he arrived in Beijing, you can be sure that he does now.
Because it was a warning issued by a leader who is very much Trump’s equal in power and way more experienced at using it.
Amid the pomp of Trump’s arrival on Thursday, Xi invoked a classical Greek reference suggesting that war is often inevitable when a rising power challenges a hegemon.
It’s a relatively modern concept based around the historian Thucydides’s quote about the second Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.): “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
The Western view has Sparta as the United States and China as the upstart Athens. Xi may see it differently.
While the People’s Republic of China was officially founded on October 1, 1949, its cultural roots extend 3,500 to 3,700 years back to the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600 BCE). At 250 years old, the U.S. is just a baby.
Trump is consumed with manipulating the markets on Fox News. Xi sees power in terms of centuries rather than news cycles.
Up to now, China has treated Trump with kid gloves. But as a sophisticated anathema to the fast-talking, knee-jerk Trump, Xi has taken off the gloves this week, hinting at the power at his fingertips.
And Trump looks shaken.
He left Washington on Tuesday in a bombastic mood, insulting a female reporter on the way to his Marine One helicopter and insisting he doesn’t give a thought to Americans struggling with their finances.
Before that, for nights on end, he spewed Truth Social posts lambasting everyone from Barack Obama to his own appointed Supreme Court Justices, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
But since that shaded welcome and two hours of talks behind closed doors with his “friend” Xi, Trump has been muted. He looks serious and thoughtful...and old.
Inside the Great Hall of the People, Xi told Trump that “the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations.
“If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy,” he added, according to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning.
But it is the Thucydides Trap quandary that is haunting Trump.
Professor Graham Allison, the Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who coined the phrase for his 2014 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap, visited Xi in China recently. No doubt the trap concept seemed relevant to the Chinese leader, although he had used it before.
Xi framed it as a warning, and further analysis shows that it is not inevitable under the model. Harvard Thucydides’s Trap Project identified 16 cases in the last 500 years in which a major rising power has threatened to displace a major ruling power. Four of those 16 cases did not result in war.
Taiwan worried before the state visit that Trump could sell them out in his haste to make nice with China. They will be even more concerned now that the U.S. president has been confronted with the possibility that America and China could be on the verge of becoming case number 17.
No wonder the teetotal Trump was raising a glass of wine at the state dinner.
The truth is that neither side needs a war right now, but history has shown that what nations need and what they get aren’t always the same.
For now, at least, it’s just a gentle warning from a leader demanding respect. He will do what is necessary to Make China Great Again.
On his flight home on Air Force One on Friday, Trump might want to read up on another trap he is in great danger of dropping his country into.
Charles Kindleberger, an architect of the Marshall Plan, argued that the U.S. failed to accept its superpower responsibilities after supplanting Great Britain in the 1930s. As a result, he claimed the global order collapsed into depression, genocide, and World War Two.
After decades at the head of the table, the U.S. under Trump has withdrawn from 66 international organizations and environmental treaties, including the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, and major United Nations climate bodies.
Trump has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz to the world’s oil because of his ill-conceived war. The Kindleberger Trap would suggest that America’s abrogation of its global superpower responsibilities has left a vacuum that only China could fill.
America First could quickly become America Last.
Xi will know all the traps, as will Trump’s other “friend,” Vladimir Putin.
No wonder the American president looks so glum. The world is so much more real when you are not simply posting hatred from your bedroom.
