China's President Xi Jinping invoked the "Thucydides Trap" during last month's high-stakes summit with President Donald Trump in Beijing, asking whether the two nations can "transcend the so-called 'Thucydides Trap' and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations," according to a new Heritage Foundation analysis published June 8, 2026. The commentary by Jeff M. Smith and Allen Zhang argues that Beijing has weaponized an academic concept to portray itself as a victim and shift responsibility for avoiding conflict onto Washington. The report traces China's dramatic about-face on the theory, which holds that when a rising power challenges an established power, war becomes highly probable—a dynamic that Harvard scholar Graham Allison claimed occurred "in 12 of the 16 cases over the past 500 years."
Beijing's relationship with the Thucydides Trap has undergone a complete reversal. In 2015, Xi told a Seattle audience that "there is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world." As recently as 2022, a Chinese government spokesman maintained that China "never believed in the so-called Thucydides Trap." By 2023, however, Xi acknowledged the Trap during a meeting with visiting U.S. senators but stressed that conflict was "not inevitable." One year later, Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng declared that "Chinese culture provides many inspirations for navigating around the Thucydides Trap." Xi's 2026 summit invocation marks the clearest sign yet that the Chinese Communist Party now sees the Trap as a phenomenon requiring direct engagement.
The Heritage report argues that China has embraced the concept for strategic reasons. "The Thucydides Trap is vulnerable to being warped to portray China as the victim," the authors write, adding that "it reductively characterizes rising powers as reactive and strips them of agency." According to Smith and Zhang, the framework often carries "a thinly veiled critique of the United States," with implicit framing that "the established power bears more responsibility for conflict." The report notes that Allison's work often portrays the U.S. as "a jealous and naïve power that is struggling with 'having to cope with a nation that is [America's] equal,'" while characterizing China as expanding organically and causing understandable friction, much as America once did during its own rise.
The authors challenge the Trap's applicability to current U.S.-China relations on multiple grounds. They point out that while China's rise is undeniable, claims of American decline are overstated—the U.S. share of global GDP stood at roughly 25 percent in 1996 and remains at 25 percent today, three decades later. More fundamentally, the report contends that discussions around the Thucydides Trap "often fail to account for the fact that the United States has rational reasons for taking competitive actions against China that have less to do with shifting GDP charts than legitimate concerns about military and economic coercion, territorial aggression, as well as widespread espionage and intellectual property theft." The authors ask why China's neighbors and nations further abroad share many of the same concerns if the main driver is simply U.S. fear of losing its position. They cite India as a telling contrast—a nation with population and growth rates now exceeding China's that "has not evoked a fraction of fear and concern abroad that China has" because "regime type and regime behavior are often equally or more consequential" than relative power alone.
The report concludes that Beijing is embracing the Thucydides Trap construct to shift responsibility for stability onto Washington, framing U.S. competitive measures as attempts to suppress a rising competitor rather than responses to "predatory and coercive actions taken by the CCP." Smith and Zhang argue that American tariffs, sanctions, and export controls were formulated in response to longstanding concerns over Beijing's disruptive conduct, not mere power anxiety. "Beijing is now embracing this construct, hoping to shift the responsibility for stability and avoiding escalation onto Washington," they warn. "We shouldn't fall for the trap."