The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Why War With China Is Not Inevitable

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Chinese officials increasingly warn about the so-called “Thucydides Trap,” the idea that a rising China and an established United States are destined for war. But the historical comparison falls apart under closer examination.  From ancient Athens and Sparta to modern America and China, Hanson breaks down why the analogy is flawed, why the United States is not a declining power, and why China may be facing deeper long term problems than many in the West are willing to admit.   Despite endless predictions of American decline, the United States still leads China in energy production, military power, food security, technological dominance, alliances, and economic productivity, while China faces mounting problems with demographics, debt, energy dependence, and slowing growth, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”  👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen from the Daily Signal. Recently at the American Chinese summit in Beijing, Premier Chi mentioned that he hoped that both parties, the United States and China, could avoid the Thucydides' truceity's trust. What did that mean? It refers to a book and an article by the well-known political scientist Graham Allison. And in it, he presented a paradigm of international relations. And briefly, it was this, that if you have an established power like ancient Sparta and it gets worried that there's an incending power, a rising new neighborhood bully or something,

the older power, the established power, will attack it, and there will be a war. And he gave some examples from history. Now, he called it the Thucydides trap because in the historian Thucydides, it was born about 460 BC and died somewhere around 400 or 395 BC. He wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War. And at two key places in his first book or chapter, he said that there were various reasons to go to war, but probably, in his opinion, the most likely, and he said this in two different places, was that Sparta was afraid of the dominance that was growing throughout the Greek

world, and so it staged a preventive war by invading Attica, the country around Athens in 431. And he used this term that he created called a Thucydides trap, and then he applied it to some incidents in history. but most importantly, Chi was resonating his book, because in the book it said that the United States might do something rash or it might prevent. With all due respect to Graham Allison, who was a very distinguished scholar,

this is false. And first of all, if you read Thucydides, Athens did not become ascendant in 431. It was responsible for the victory at Salamis. Athens and Sparta had partnered with each other. They fell out. They had another war called the first Peloponnesian War from 460 to 446, 30 years before the Peloponnesian War. So that's the first thing.

And second, Thucydides has a tendency to give all sorts of different interpretations that are sometimes mutually incompatible. They're antithetical to each other. Now, why is that? because he broke off his history in 4-11, whether because he died or he didn't finish it, we don't know. But it was never revised or rewrote to discover discrepancies or to get a uniform narrative. So what I'm getting at is that he said elsewhere in the book that there were fundamental existential differences. Sparta was a democracy. excuse me, Sparta was an oligarchy, Athens was a democracy.

Sparta was a land power with a superb infantry. Athens was a maritime empire with a great navy. Athens was cosmopolitan. Sparta was insular and parochial. Tribally or ethnically, the Athenian Greeks were Ionian, the Spartans were Dorian. And Athenians had a model of chattel slavery. The Spartans used indentured serfs or helots. I could go on, but there were so many differences that Thucydides accentuated throughout the history.

It was bound maybe that they would have problems, as they did in the first Peloponnesian War and as they did after the Persian War well before this. Now, does this apply to us at all with China? I don't think that we are a stodgy, worried establishment power, and China is the new ascendant worry and that we're going to preempt. Why do I think that's not going to happen? And all the major criteria that denote whether a superpower is strong or it's in decline, we're ascending. China is the one that has the problem. Fertility 1.7, ours, China 1.0, shrinking and getting older. Oil production, fuel, the stuff that empires are made of, we're the largest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization.

China has to import 70% of its oil. Food, our food, we're the biggest exporter in the world, and the value of our agricultural products is on match. China is now, as it gets more affluent, its taste have diverged, and it's importing 30% of its food. Nuclear power, we are the greatest civilian user of nuclear power, and we're ahead in fusion nuclear power. For military purposes, I don't want to get into that, but we have 6,000 to 7,000 nuclear weapons. China has 6 or 700.

Nuclear carriers, aircraft carrier groups, we invented them 100 years ago. We've had 100 years of expertise. China, 15. China is trying to get a third carrier group. We have 11. Combat aircraft, ours are better and more numerous. So we could go on and on and on. But in every barometer of cultural, social, military, political power, we overshadow China.

We're a free society or constitution is older and more stable. We eight of the top ten companies in the world by market capitalization or American, not Chinese. One American produces 40% more GDP than four of his Chinese counterparts. So that model that we are worried because we're losing influence or power to this upstart doesn't really hold. More importantly, when the upstart and the establishment power have a confrontation, it's not the establishment power that always preempts. It's usually the upstart. Germany was flattened after World War I. It recovered, and it wanted to challenge the British Empire. And it did. And it lost World War II. Japan, Imperial Japan, 1941, it attacked the great United States. which was a much more industrial and powerful country, and it lost. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union was rector in World War II, and it wanted to challenge us, the global hegemon, and we won the Cold War.

More importantly, when you have these antitheses between a rising power, supposedly, and an establishment power, it doesn't always lead to war, not just the rising power loses, but look what happened when the United States, somewhere around 1870 to 1920, challenged the primacy of the British Empire and the British Navy. There was no war that resulted when we took the place of Britain as the world's policemen. 1950, after World War II, Germany had been defeated. France and Britain were the powerhouses of Europe and what happened. There was a German miracle and West Germany and loan by 1970 was running Europe.

There was no war between these two nations, these two blocks. So there doesn't, war is not inevitable, even if, and if it is inevitable, it's not the establishment power that starts it, usually, it's the upstart, and the upstart usually loses. So what does this mean to Chinese-American relationship? There is no Thucydides' trap, ancient or modern. We are not Athens, and they are not Sparta. We're not going to have a preventive war, start one, to stop China's rise.

If anything, China is starting to have fundamental existential problems with fertility, finance, debt, energy, food that make it a little bit unstable. But we both are nuclear powers. We deter each other. So how will these differences, these fundamental differences, be resolved? Taiwan's a sore spot, but mostly, as I said, it's going to be resolved by both that have nuclear weapons and they don't want Armageddon. There's going to be a balance of power. One side will use Russia to be friendly. The other side will try to be friendly with Russia.

There will be a Kissinger triangulation, no better friend, no worse enemy, each one to one another in a triangle. We have alliances. China has its North Korea. what was left of Iran. Sometimes it cozies up to Russia. We have NATO. We have Western Hemisphere. We have Japan, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea.

So we have a balance of power, alliances, and military deterrence. There is no Thucydides trap. If there were, it would not apply to us. And if it did apply to us, we would not start a war. And if we did start a war, we'd be foolish. But we would probably win a conventional war. So the entire notion that Premier Chi said is bankrupt, but it should be expected from the Chinese to adopt the idea that they're

the rising power and that we're on the way out. All on true. Thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hanson for The Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in a tradition.