The Thucydides Trap Sprung by Default: Trump in Beijing and the Welcome Eclipse of a Malignant American Empire

I’ll defer to Bryan Mercadente and Sebastian Wang on the details. But you don’t need to be a student of classical history to recognize the irony when a Chinese leader invokes the Thucydides Trap before an American president. Xi Jinping did not do so out of scholarly whimsy. He did it because the structural realities of the early twenty-first century have rendered the old unipolar conceit unsustainable, and because the moment demanded a polite but unmistakable statement of the obvious: the age of automatic American primacy is over. What followed—Trump’s characteristic transformation of a civilizational conversation into a domestic campaign riff, the ritual pageantry of state banquets, the quiet American hedging on Taiwan, and the unspoken plea for Chinese help in cleaning up the mess in the Strait of Hormuz—served only to dramatize a deeper truth. The United States is in decline, and for the world at large, and ultimately for the American people themselves, this is not a misfortune but a deliverance.

The facts of the summit, as reported even in the most guarded Western outlets, are by now familiar. Xi spoke of history and systems. Trump heard only the word “decline” and immediately rerouted it into the familiar cul-de-sac of Biden-bashing, open borders, and the usual litany of grievances that have sustained his political brand. Where Xi described a “new paradigm of major country relations,” Trump saw a compliment to his own restoration of greatness. The disconnect was almost comic, except that comedy of this sort has become the signature of late-imperial American statecraft: the inability to distinguish between the national interest and the psychic needs of the man in the Oval Office. Xi treated the encounter as the meeting of two poles in a multipolar order. Trump treated it as an extended infomercial for Boeing, soybeans, and whatever unconfirmed “fantastic deals” could be dangled before the cameras. The body language, as even the most credulous observers noted, told the real story. One leader spoke from a position of industrial and technological momentum. The other arrived weakened by a war of choice in Iran that has metastasized into an energy crisis.

The rise of China is not a passing mood swing induced by any single American administration. It is the logical consequence of the global system American capital created after 1945 and accelerated after 1979: the offshoring of manufacturing, the financialization of the domestic economy, the hollowing-out of the American working class, and the bipartisan delusion that the United States could retain the rents of globalization while exporting its costs. China did not steal America’s lunch. It learned the recipe America itself had printed and distributed to the world. Britain, when displaced by the United States a century ago, could console itself that the new hegemon spoke the same language, worshipped at the same financial altars, and largely preserved the maritime-commercial order that had enriched and would continue enriching its own elite. China offers no comforting continuity. It builds a different center of gravity—state-directed, manufacturing-first, BRICS-oriented—and it does so without the slightest intention of becoming Washington’s junior partner in a rebranded Anglo-American condominium.

This is why the American establishment has reacted with such panic and denial. It is not merely losing relative power. It is losing power to a civilization it cannot co-opt or domesticate. The result is the spectacle we have just witnessed: an American president reduced to hoping that Xi Jinping will lean on Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that Republican incumbents might survive the next election cycle. “Why should I clean your shit?” as one Chinese analyst reportedly put it. The vulgarity is unfortunate; the accuracy is unassailable. America First, it turns out, means asking the Chinese Communist Party to rescue the GOP from the consequences of a war the United States itself started and cannot finish.

The implications for Taiwan are equally revealing. Xi made the island the central strategic issue of the summit, tying it explicitly to the possibility of conflict. Trump, who had arrived boasting that he would have “that discussion” with Xi, emerged undecided on a $14 billion arms package his own administration had previously authorized. He consulted Beijing directly on the matter—breaking decades of precedent—and then refused to affirm, even in the vaguest terms, that the United States would defend Taiwan against invasion. Strategic ambiguity has been policy for decades. Trump’s version sounded less like disciplined restraint than transactional horse-trading. He needs Chinese help on energy prices. Beijing wants breathing room on its core interests. It was pawn-shop diplomacy. The Marco Rubio sanctions dance—same man, different bureaucratic hat—only underscored the farce. Even America’s loudest China hawks now find it expedient to play along.

None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the trajectory of American power since the end of the Cold War. That power has been exercised, with astonishing consistency, for malign ends. Abroad, it has meant endless wars of choice—Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, now Iran—sold on pretexts that collapse under minimal scrutiny and leaving behind failed states, refugee crises, and breeding grounds for the terrorism they were supposed to eradicate. At home, it has meant the deliberate deindustrialization of the heartland, the explosion of financial predation, the weaponization of the dollar and sanctions regime against any nation that dares pursue independent development, and the steady erosion of the constitutional order in favor of an unaccountable national-security state. The American people have paid for this empire with their blood, their treasure, their communities, and their future. The ruling class—Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the foreign-policy “Blob,” and their journalistic auxiliaries—has grown obscenely rich from it.

This is why the decline of American hegemony, while not an unalloyed blessing for every corner of the globe, represents a net step forward for humanity. A more multipolar world is inherently less prone to the catastrophic hubris that a single superpower can indulge. It forces negotiation where Washington once dictated. It creates space for alternative development models—China’s Belt and Road, the BRICS financial architecture, Eurasian integration—that do not require genuflection before the IMF or the Pentagon. For the average American, the end of empire means resources that have been squandered on carrier groups and forever wars can, in principle, be redirected toward domestic renewal. The empire has never been “good” for the republic. It has been its ruthless destroyer.

There are, to be sure, losers in this transition. The British ruling class is chief among them. For decades London has subcontracted its global rent-seeking to American hard power, draping itself in the tattered Union Jack while relying on the U.S. Navy, the dollar system, and the threat of sanctions to extract its cut from the post-imperial periphery. The City of London’s financial parasitism, the remnants of the old colonial trading networks, the Five Eyes intelligence apparatus—all of it has been underwritten by the illusion of American omnipotence. As that illusion fades, Britain will face a reckoning more painful than Suez, more structural than Brexit. The question, as I asked the other day in response to Bryan Mercadente’s essay, is whether this can be done in time to save Britain from its own Century of Humiliation.

Smaller American client states—Singapore comes to mind—will also have to recalibrate. Hedging is already the prudent course. The United States can no longer guarantee the security of every Southeast Asian entrepôt against a rising China, nor does it any longer pretend to. The old certainties are dissolving.

The transition will not be painless. Power vacuums invite turbulence. Old alliances fracture. New rivalries emerge. The immediate aftermath of American eclipse may well prove more unstable than the final decades of its dominance. History is not linear, and no serious observer should indulge in Panglossian forecasts. Yet the broader arc points toward something better: a world in which no single capital can impose its will or its financial architecture on the rest. It will be a world in which great powers must accommodate one another rather than simply overawe them. It will be a world, in short, that may at last allow the possibility of a more peaceful and more progressive age—one in which the energies now consumed by maintaining American primacy can be turned toward the real tasks of human development.

Trump returned from Beijing with rose seeds for the White House garden and envy for Xi’s ballroom. History, meanwhile, delivered a different message. The landlord has begun to realize the building has a new owner. The Thucydides Trap was never about destiny. It was always about whether declining powers can accept reality before fear and miscalculation turn the inevitable into the catastrophic. In Beijing, the United States took another quiet step toward that acceptance—grudging and largely unconscious, but a step nonetheless. For those who value peace over primacy, justice over empire, and the well-being of peoples over the vanity of hegemons, it is a development to be quietly welcomed. The American century was never as benevolent as its propagandists claimed. Its gentle close may prove one of the more constructive chapters in modern world history. Perhaps Donald Trump has not been such a waste of time.