Xi Jinping's 'Thucydides Trap' warning: Is China outsmarting the US without engaging in actual conflict?

Xi Jinping's warning last week to the US not to fall into the 'Thucydides Trap' has Sun Tzu written all over. 'The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,' the 6th-c. BC military strategist had said, a dictum underpinning the latest notion of China-US 'constructive strategic stability'.

China always cloaks its intent in complex, often vague, diplomatic coinage. Such vagueness provides latitude to pursue policies without being bound by commitments.

In this case, such an understanding is primarily an acknowledgment that whatever US policy of sanctions and tech controls China has disregarded is, at best, 'manageable differences'. Or, as Xi put it, 'We must make it work and never mess it up.'


The problem for the US is that China has already messed it up for Washington. And Trump is now appearing increasingly uncertain of fighting the battle he once championed. Beijing has been fighting, but in line with Sun Tzu's broader frame, subduing its adversary without shedding blood.

China's last bloody conflict was the 1979 Sino-Vietnam war. The only other rupture was the 2020 Galwan clash with India, from which it quickly withdrew to avoid any further bloodshed. No other great power in the past two centuries - from Britain, France and Germany to the Soviet Union and the US - has risen this way.

In fact, China has sought to benefit from others who do its fighting. In the beginning, it was the Soviet Union as part of the communist bloc. Next came the US in two parts - first in the 1980s as leverage against the Soviets, and then in the 1990s as a shining example of flourishing capitalism in a communist country.

In the 2000s, a more prosperous China switched strategy to build a front through proxies - North Korea, Iran, Libya, Venezuela - that took on the US. Some others like Pakistan acted as conduits. China benefited through the entire post-  9/11 period when the world fought the 'war on terror' while it still economically engaged with, and strengthened, these frontal states that had dubious records in supporting-sponsoring terror outfits.

This policy has delivered China three strategic intervals of growth - the 1980s, much of the 1990s, and from the early 2000s till 2014-15 - during which time it strengthened itself militarily and economically. Then came the break with Xi's ascendancy and his determination to establish China as an equal power to the US.

This raised the political cost for Beijing as it emphasised on projecting political power through geographic assertion and economic weaponisation in Asia and the Indo-Pacific. It was Trump who called out China in his first term, resulting in a coalition of powers against Beijing.

This was also when Xi first started articulating the need to avoid the 'Thucydides Trap'. While Chinese aggression and nationalism was at its peak, Beijing was in no frame to escalate conflict into war in any theatre. The biggest dilemma was, of course, with Taiwan, where any escalation could lead into direct confrontation with the US.

Trump 2.0, however, released that pressure. It turned the spotlight on a new US that wanted to weaponise trade through tariffs and coercion. More importantly, Washington gave Beijing a tactical window to withdraw and reposition itself from being a destabilising challenger to a rightful competitor. Through this new paradigm of 'competitive strategic stability' with the US, Xi has given himself political space to close the last anti-China decade and start a new growth phase. In other words, Xi has laid the ground for a fourth strategic interval - an unexpected opportunity delivered by Trump 2.0.

For Trump, reality couldn't be starker. The US military has been up against Chinese military might - even support - in Iran. Over the past few weeks, the Trump regime sanctioned a host of Chinese intermediaries for helping Tehran with dual-use items to bolster its ballistic missile programme. The war itself has put him in a political spot at home ahead of the midterms. And, yet, Trump was subdued by Xi in Beijing last week as the latter pursued the former with a Busan G2 frame.

For India, the first big lesson is how China creates strategic intervals without engaging in actual conflict. To be fair, New Delhi has sought to create such windows, as is evident from the latest effort with Europe. But the bigger lesson is the leverage China managed to build globally through rapid domestic transformation during these strategic intervals.

What it tells us is that any such period is politically finite, and if not used with urgency, it can go down as wasted opportunity. After last week's Beijing summit, Xi's China is no longer perceived as principal villain of the piece - or of peace. So, Beijing will look for new beginnings as a repackaged 'benign' world power, while trying to fathom whether Iran's strategy of blockading the Hormuz Strait can work in Taiwan.

There was more said in the unspoken when Xi met Trump. It signals the start of another Chinese moment, to which an increasingly inconsistent US may want to turn around and respond suddenly. But Washington's potential partners, especially those with an inherent rivalry with China, will have to hedge, prepare and plan better, fully aware of the limits the US has built into its own strategic play.