India-China rivalry could be the real Thucydides Trap
What if, rather than China being the emerging power coming to challenge America’s dominance, China is the existing dominant force heading for conflict with rising superpower India?
It’s unusual for a new academic theory to break through into the popular consciousness. However, when it comes to one that is not only being espoused by a prominent Harvard professor, but also predicted that War War 3 was almost enviable, it is perhaps easy to understand why people paid attention.
In a 2012 op-ed for the Financial Times, Prof Graham Allison first outlined what he called the “Thucydides Trap”. Named after the Ancient Greek historian who first observed it in relation to Athens and Sparta, the theory states that when an established power fears being challenged by a rising power, violent conflict is almost always inevitable.
To support this, Prof Allison highlighted sixteen examples from history where such power transitions had occurred, and noted that in all but four of these cases, war had followed. This, Allison warned, didn’t augur well for the future, as an anxious America watches an ever more powerful and forceful China increasingly challenge America's existing global dominance.
The theory quickly gained traction, and not just among academics. As early as 2013, President Xi was telling Western visitors that “we must all work together to avoid Thucydides’s trap.” In 2018, the Financial Times listed it as one of “the words that defined” the year.
More recently the theory has come in for its fair share of criticism, both from inside academia and by policy makers and diplomats. Some have questioned Prof Allison’s interpretation of the examples cited, while others have pointed out that the advent of nuclear weapons has fundamentally changed the nature of geopolitics.
Yet, what if Prof Allison was both right and wrong? Or, more specifically, right about the mechanism, but applying the theory to the wrong countries. What if, rather than China being the emerging power coming to challenge America’s dominance, it is actually China which is the existing power, and India that is the new rising force looking to challenge it?
Western commentators tend to ignore India when discussing contemporary geopolitics, preferring instead to focus on China, Russia and America. Yet, in recent years, India has started to emerge a major power in its own right. In 2023, it became the fourth country ever to achieve a soft-landing of a probe on the surface of the moon, displaying a high degree of technological prowess and prompting talk of a new Asian space race between India and China. The timing was all the more significant as it was the same year that India overtook China as the world's most populous country.
India’s economy continues to motor along, with the World Bank projecting it to be the fastest growing major economy for the next two years. By contrast, decades of breakneck growth have left the Chinese government battling a number of asset bubbles, as the country undergoes a form a financial indigestion (albeit still achieving economic growth rates that most western governments can only dream of). Add to this a coming demographic crunch, with China’s population projected to both shrink and age at almost unprecedented rates, and you can see how the power dynamic in the region is already starting to shift towards India.
Against this backdrop, it is easy to see how a more confident India could look to assert itself more in international affairs, and how China may feel that this challenges its current regional dominance.
There are other reasons why a conflict between India and China could be more likely than between China and the US. America is separated from China by a vast ocean, meaning that, while disputes may flare up over sea lanes and Taiwan, neither side could ever realistically invade the other. Trump may be concerned that China is “operating the Panama Canal”, but he isn’t worried that this could threaten America's territorial integrity.
India and China, by contrast, share a vast and contested border, stretching over 3,000 km. This has already been a source of conflict, with the two countries fighting a brief war in 1962 over it, in which 1,000 soldiers were killed. In recent years, there have been smaller-scale border clashes between Indian and Chinese soldiers, with one bloody incident in 2020 resulting in the death of 20 Indian soldiers.
The border is not the only source of tension between the two countries. India has long been frustrated by China’s military support and arms sales to Pakistan, which included helping the country develop nuclear weapons in the 1970s. There are also concerns in India over the large number of Chinese ports and military bases popping up around the Indian Ocean, often referred to as China’s “string of pearls”. How much longer will New Delhi tolerate this Chinese presence in their own backyard?
None of this is to say that the two countries are on an inevitable path to war. Last year, Prime Minister Modi and President Xi formally met for the first time in five years at the BRICS summit in Russia, and pledged to start a dialogue with each other on a range of issues. Nonetheless, Western leaders would be wise to pay more attention to the relationship between these two nuclear powers if we want to stand a chance of escaping the Thucydides Trap.
James Rose is a freelance writer specialising in demographics and politics. His work has previously appeared in The Times, The New European, The Big Issue and Politics.co.uk.