Culture | The Thucydides Trap

Will America and China go to war?

The big foreign-policy question that is worrying Washington

|3 min read

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? By Graham Allison. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 384 pages; $28. Scribe; £18.99.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Fated to fight?”

Why Germany’s current-account surplus is bad for the world economy

From the July 8th 2017 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition
David Corenswet in "Superman"

What Superman tells you about American foreign policy

Should a man who can do anything choose to do nothing?

Muriel Spark lies on the floor while writing in 1960

Handling feelings with rubber gloves: the odd life of Muriel Spark

An abandoned son, scorned lovers and dazzling, manipulative prose


Musician Bruce Springsteen during a campaign event with Kamala Harris in Georgia

Why the left gains nothing from pop stars’ support

Artists are entitled to share their views. Doing so is not always noble or wise


What to watch this weekend

Stories of tennis players, chefs and rock stars

Stop crying your heart out—for Oasis have returned to the stage

They are much more popular today than their Britpop peers

Inside the uneasy, incongruous coalition of the Big Three

A new book traces the wartime relationship between Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin