Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
“The most timely and important book I read last year.”
Why it is worth your time
Destined for War is Graham Allison's 2017 study of the US-China rivalry. Allison, a Harvard political scientist and former Pentagon official, reviews 16 cases over 500 years in which a rising power challenged a ruling one. He counts 12 that ended in war and asks whether Washington and Beijing can avoid the same outcome, a pattern he calls the Thucydides Trap. Sacks posted in Jan 2019 that it was the most timely and important book he had read the previous year. He returns to US-China competition often on the podcast, and it framed much of his brief as White House AI and crypto czar in 2025. It suits readers who want the structural case for why the two countries clash. Critics disagree on the method. The caveats are that historian Arthur Waldron argues no Thucydides Trap exists in the Greek text, and Richard Hanania, in Strategic Studies Quarterly, calls the 16-case selection anecdotal.
