The distinguished political scientist Graham Allison, author of the 2015 Atlantic article "The Thucydides Trap," argued that often in history an established power will stage a preventive war against an ascendant adversary – for fear that otherwise it will soon lose its primacy.

His title derives from two passages in the first book of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (460-400/395? B.C.), author of "The Peloponnesian War."

Thucydides, on these two occasions, felt that the most likely cause of the Spartan-Athenian war (431-404) was Spartan fear of an increasingly powerful rival Athenian empire. That anxiety supposedly prompted a Spartan preventive invasion before, so Sparta believed it would be insidiously eclipsed by its more dynamic Athenian competitor.

Allison and others argue that this paradigm now applies to the United States. It is the supposed jittery established power – and a rising Communist China is the upstart contender. His theory implies that the U.S. might, like Sparta, take provocative steps to abort an inevitable Chinese-dominated world.

There are, however, a number of problems, ancient and modern, with Allison's intriguing thesis.

First, Thucydides left his history unfinished and unrevised. And so often he offers analyses that are contradicted by his other observations elsewhere in history.

For example, in a variety of passages, the historian contrasts the antithetical Spartan and Athenian systems. He does this to explain why they often fell into........

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