In Washington, a decade of rancorous polarization just gave us the longest ever government shutdown. But one belief has endured on both sides of the aisle: that the world order, built and led by the United States, is under threat from China, which aims to usurp America’s rightful place atop it.
There’s a phrase that encapsulates the theory: the Thucydides trap, referring to the violent clash that comes when a rising power challenges the ruling hegemon. In Thucydides’ time, it was Athens that threatened — and then made its own — the pre-eminence of Sparta. But it is a pattern that has played out repeatedly through history, with the ambition and aggression of the challenger almost always ending in bloodshed.
President Trump’s second term has upended this assumption. With its litany of chaos, the administration has pursued all on its own a root-and-branch destruction of the global order America made — threatening invasions, deploying punitive tariffs indiscriminately and all but abandoning longstanding alliances. China, by contrast, has responded mostly with a steely insistence on the status quo. In a startling reversal, it is America, not China, that seems determined to spring Thucydides’ trap. At the world’s summit, America is overthrowing America.
The bipartisan consensus, now showing signs of strain, was built on a misreading of China’s intentions. That, at least, is the argument of a provocative recent paper published in the M.I.T. journal International Security by three East Asia scholars. “China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability,” the authors write, “and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented.”
This cleareyed analysis was based on an examination of a vast corpus of Chinese documents and publications, from official speeches to school curriculums. The conclusions were striking. China’s stated territorial concerns, the authors found, do not extend beyond its long-held claim to Taiwan and relatively small border areas. “China’s aims are unambiguous; China’s aims are enduring; and China’s aims are limited,” they write.
Much of China’s foreign policy, rather than exporting its ideology abroad, is aimed at shoring up the power of the Communist Party at home. What outside observers take to be aggressive moves are often aimed at solving internal problems. Take its Belt and Road Initiative, which some see as a quasi-imperial effort to win the loyalty of developing nations. One of the paper’s authors, Zenobia Chan, a scholar of international relations who teaches at Georgetown University, said that the initiative was driven more by internal considerations than global ambition.
“A lot of it is driven by domestic needs, excess industrial capacity after the global financial crisis,” she told me. China has for the most part not sought to use these investments as leverage for its global ambitions, she added, beyond its longstanding demand that its partners adhere to a One China policy and avoid recognizing the independence of Taiwan. It certainly has not asked developing nations to choose between itself and the United States.
China, to be sure, is hardly a virtuous or even benign actor on the global stage. Its aggression in the South China Sea, vicious repression in Xinjiang, crackdown on Hong Kong and implacable desire to claim Taiwan — no matter what the Taiwanese people want — pose serious challenges to peace and order in Asia and challenge basic principles of human rights. The escalating diplomatic spat with Japan, suspending seafood imports and advising citizens to avoid travel there, demonstrates China’s capacity for menace.
But these actions, however brutal, fall far short of a fundamental reordering of the world. China seems to be asserting what it views as historical claims and domestic prerogatives within the existing system, bending the rules in ways the United States, especially under Trump, is hardly in a position to protest. The distinction matters: A power defending the status quo, even aggressively, poses different challenges than one seeking to remake the world in its image.
It may be outmoded, in any case, to think of a single power superintending the world. “It is not simply that the United States is in relative decline, or even that China is rising, but rather that compared with earlier decades, power is held more widely and by a variety of powers in different regions,” Emma Ashford writes in her bracing new book, “First Among Equals.” “The United States and China are ahead of the pack, but by far less than their Cold War counterparts.” Multipolar complexity, not bipolar confrontation, is the future.
Trump, it’s fair to say, is not responding well to this reality. Of his wild threats, the recent one suggesting military action against Nigeria — on the ground that it “continues to allow the killing of Christians” — is perhaps the most symptomatic of his frustration. The United States, of course, has always played by its own set of rules. But Trump has abandoned even a fig leaf of fealty to principle. “It’s one thing to say: There’s some rules of international law that don’t apply to us,” the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta told me. “It’s another thing to say: I really don’t care what international law is.”
Trump or no, the military adventurism of the past two decades has become an unmistakable sign of decline. “If we’re having to maintain primacy by invading this country that’s not posing a threat to us and launching a global campaign of antiterror, clearly, we’re on the decline,” Van Jackson, a progressive foreign policy scholar and an author of “The Rivalry Peril,” told me. “It has always been the case in these cycles of history that when the dominant power starts investing and playing this military role globally, you have rising powers who are stepping up, playing a more important economic role globally.”
History is littered with examples of the dangers of aggression for declining powers — Spain’s crusading military folly in the 16th century, the late Ottoman Empire’s embrace of ethnic nationalism, Britain’s vain attempt to cling to its unsustainable imperial position between the world wars. Each end the same way: an astonishingly rapid loss of power and prestige on the global stage.
This might not be exactly what’s happening. For all Trump’s threats of military action abroad, with the exception of the brief airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites and the bombing of small boats in the Caribbean, he seems most interested in deploying the military to police American citizens. In part, this may be training troops — as he told the military brass — for adventures abroad. But it’s hard not to think that waging battles against people who live in Democrat-governed cities is an end in itself.
Likewise, Trump’s aggressive tariff warfare has less to do with the world than it seems. The volley was supposedly about leveling the playing field with countries that are “ripping off” America and punishing countries whose policies harm Americans. (Fentanyl is a prime example.) But the recent Supreme Court arguments over Trump’s use of tariffs made clear that these levies raise cash mostly from Americans, bypassing the constitutional power of the purse vested in Congress. The tariffs, in short, looked global but hit locally.
This leads to an irresistible irony. Far from beating back China, America under Trump may come to resemble it. The country is on its way: obsessed with regime stability and willing to use almost any means to keep its people under control; jealously guarding its near periphery while remaining largely uninterested in leading the world; and building a cult of personality around its autocratic leader in an atmosphere of ethnonationalist triumphalism.
Trump, despite his vituperative campaign rhetoric, has never really been a China hawk, even if some around him have led the charge for more aggressive policies to blunt China’s might. Indeed, he has often lavished praise on Xi Jinping, a man who has the kind of virtually limitless power Trump clearly craves. “President Xi is a great leader of a great country,” Trump cooed at their meeting in South Korea last month.
This praise comes as the United States is retreating from the multilateral bodies that it helped create — the United Nations, the World Health Organization and more. As for the Group of 20, starting this weekend in South Africa, Trump announced months ago that he would not attend and would dispatch Vice President JD Vance instead. Vance has played the role of finger-wagging attack dog, lecturing Europeans about free speech and dressing down President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. One can only imagine what he might have said in Johannesburg.
But we will never know, because Trump abruptly announced earlier this month that the United States would boycott the meeting entirely, preposterously claiming that white South Africans were the victims of persecution and genocidal violence at the hands of the country’s Black majority. “No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue,” Trump wrote on social media. Then on Thursday, the administration changed course again, asking to send a small, low-level delegation after all, though it would not participate in the summit discussions.
China is playing a much longer and more sophisticated game. Premier Li Qiang, Xi’s top emissary, will be in Johannesburg, accompanied by a vast retinue of officials, ready to talk with the world’s major economies about the problems and possibilities of the emerging multipolar order.
As its primacy fades, the United States now faces a choice: meet rising nations as respected partners in building a new, more equitable multipolar world or seek the costly, brittle power that comes from domination. Trump has chosen the latter; China, it seems, seeks the former. History tells us which path leads to peace and prosperity, and which is the road to ruin.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post America Is Setting a Trap for Itself appeared first on New York Times.
