Thucydides Trap
The Thucydides Trap refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often war. The concept originated with Herman Wouk, the novelist and World War II veteran, who used it in his Admiral Raymond A. Spruance lecture, delivered on April 16, 1980, at the U.S. Naval War College. Wouk compared the U.S.–Soviet Cold War to the "cold war" that developed between Athens and Sparta once they had defeated Persia, their common enemy, remarking:And more than two millennia later we seem still trapped in Thucydides' world. None of the ways in which those quarrelsome Greeks behaved is suited to these dread times of nuclear menace; yet we still behave in those ways, and can find no other. How do we break out of this Thucydidean trap, which now threatens to strangle, if not to destroy, our world?