Remember the Thucydides Trap? It was the popular historical analogy that foretold how a rising power, then Athens, now China, threatened the status quo power, then Sparta, now the United States. Mismanaged, that situation would lead to war.
We don’t hear much about the Thucydides Trap these days. You might say that forewarned is forearmed. Or you could be Michael Beckley, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, who argues that “the era of power transitions is ending.” Color me skeptical. Having studied how empires rise and fall for the last 3,000 years, I find it counterintuitive. Even if it is true, geopolitical dynamics, leavened by a dollop of smart national strategy, might catalyze new regional and global hierarchies.
Writing last year in Foreign Affairs, the journal of record of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, Beckley claimed that the global order is “stagnant” and we are witnessing “the end of rising powers.”
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