This morning at the crack of dawn Beijing time, Trump was awake and Truthing. He evidently had read the news coverage about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s (習近平) use of the term “Thucydides trap” at their summit on Thursday and wanted to clear the air.
“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The “Thucydides trap” is a concept popularized by political scientist Graham Allison to explain the likelihood of war when a rising power threatens to displace the established power, as it did between Athens and Sparta. In the wake of the Trump-Xi summit, the term is trending on social media, with many news outlets publishing explainers.
Trump appears to have interpreted Xi’s use of the term as a comment on specific American leaders, implicitly contrasting himself with Biden. But Xi, who has been mentioning the “Thucydides trap” for over a decade, invokes it to issue a structural, historical warning to the U.S.
China first began referencing the Thucydides trap during Xi’s state visit to the U.S. in 2015. “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves,” Xi said at the time. In other words, conflict is not inevitable. In Chinese framing, conflict can be avoided if the U.S. respects China’s “core interests,” the most important of which is Taiwan.
The Thucydides trap has become an anchor for the Chinese narrative that conflict over Taiwan is not inevitable but could be triggered by U.S. behavior. This is often reinforced in state media through a more explicitly antagonistic argument: While China remains calm until one of its red lines is crossed, the U.S. is relatively chaotic and prone to miscalculation, threatening to draw the world into unnecessary conflict.
The war in Iran has given Chinese state media much fodder for this argument: “What is urgently needed now is to prevent this conflict — one that should never have happened — from sliding into the abyss of complete loss of control,” the editorial board of state-run tabloid the Global Times wrote on March 30.
During Trump’s first term, Chinese state media noted that Trump had become “increasingly aggressive on the Taiwan question.” Trump “could blow up in anger,” the Global Times wrote, leading him to “play the ‘ultimate’ card [the Taiwan card] in his final acts of madness.”
A related narrative often spouted by state media is that the U.S. is using Taiwan as a pawn in an attempt to contain China’s rise. In a story about the various interviews that Taiwanese politicians have conducted with American and Japanese media this spring, the Global Times argued that try as they might, “a pawn can never become a player … For the U.S., Taiwan’s utility lies in being a controllable hedgehog, not a lit fuse that could ignite a conflagration consuming its handlers.” Thus, when Xi mentions the Thucydides trap to Trump, he seems to also be sending the message to Taiwan that the U.S. is an unreliable and untrustworthy partner.
“Taiwan independence and cross-strait stability are as irreconcilable as fire and water,” Xi told Trump yesterday. It’s not clear that the message landed — perhaps that’s strategic ambiguity at work.
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