The bell tolls in Beijing: Xi’s warning and the shadow of Thucydides

“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Two thousand five hundred years on, the trap is being set again — and this time the stakes are nuclear. When Xi Jinping stood on Chinese soil and asked Donald Trump whether America and China could “transcend the Thucydides Trap,” he was not extending an olive branch. He was issuing a veiled warning, the kind that comes not in thunder, but in the low, measured tremor of a man who believes the fault line has already shifted beneath his rival’s feet. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War. In 2014, […]