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Iran is the most instructive outcome of Trump-Xi summit

Harvard professor Graham Allison, who revived the term ‘Thucydides Trap’, analysed 16 historical cases where a rising power threatened a dominant one. In 12, the outcome was war.

United States President Donald Trump has landed in China for the first time in nine years. The world has changed radically. The relationship has not.

History has a habit of recycling geopolitical anxieties. For the past decade, every serious conversation about the US and China has eventually loomed toward the same spectre: the Thucydides Trap.

“What made war inevitable,” wrote Thucydides, chronicling the rivalry between Athens and Sparta in 400 BC, “was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

Harvard professor Graham Allison revived the concept for contemporary geopolitics, particularly the China–US rivalry. In his book Destined for War (2017), Allison analysed 16 historical cases where a rising power threatened to displace a dominant one. In 12, the outcome was war. The exceptions, he argued, required extraordinary leadership, restraint, and a willingness to subordinate short-term pride to long-term stability. That remains a demanding checklist—and it is not obvious that either Washington or Beijing is meeting it; the former even less so.

The ghost of Thucydides in Beijing

The Beijing summit of May 2026 has done nothing to bury the existing framework. Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has repeatedly invoked the T-Trap while speaking of America’s decline and China’s rise, drawing not-so-subtle parallels between Athens and Sparta. It’s a veiled warning for Washington not to cross Beijing’s red lines, especially on Taiwan.

Trump’s response was, to say the least, classic Trumpian. After meeting Xi in the Forbidden City, he took to Truth Social the following morning, rejecting any notion of American decline and blaming it all on “Sleepy Biden”. Instead, he projected strength—beaming of victories in Venezuela and Iran, stating that his military campaign in the latter would continue.

But bluster and self-flattery are hardly new.

Nine years and a world apart

Trump’s first state visit to China in 2017 was wrapped in ceremonial warmth, commercial optimism, and a private dinner. It promised over $250 billion in business deals. Trump called Xi a “very special man”, beginning a pattern of praise that survived even the trade war he launched less than a year later.

What followed—tariffs, technology........

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