Critical Skills

On May 14, 2026, in Beijing, Xi Jinping asked President Trump whether China and the United States could overcome the Thucydides Trap. He has used the phrase for thirteen years. Search engines spiked. Most Americans had never heard it.
They should learn it now. The pattern is real. Twelve of the last sixteen great-power transitions ended in war.
Four did not. Each of those four required statecraft, accommodation, and the willingness to think rather than shout. America has shown both kinds of behavior in its history. Sparta showed only one. Sparta won the war and vanished within a generation.
The warning deserves a serious answer. Volume is not strength. Slogans are not strategy. The test of a great nation is whether it can remain wise during periods of change.
Thucydides warned us. So did Xi.

A general who fought eighty thousand cavalry with five thousand infantry. An emperor who needed someone blamed. A court of officials who knew exactly what to say. One historian who said the other thing. The emperor sentenced him to death. He was offered the door an aristocrat walked through — a clean, honorable suicide that would save his family’s name. He chose castration instead, so he could finish the book his father had made him swear to complete. Two thousand years later, every Chinese dynastic history written between the first century and the eighteenth was modeled on his architecture. The emperor who castrated him is a footnote. The book is the foundation. He paid with his body for the first complete statement, in any civilization, of why the record must survive the recorder. Sima Qian needs to be remembered.

1933 produced a five-year legislative sequence the United States has never repeated — Glass-Steagall, the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Securities Acts — under six conditions simultaneous: a forcing crisis, a 313-to-117 electoral mandate, institutional capacity, judicial accommodation by 1937, organized labor as political force, and an information environment of shared facts.
The conditions of 2026 differ on each count. No forcing condition. A fragmented coalition. A Senate cloture rule requiring sixty votes. The post-Loper Bright judicial environment. The post-Citizens United campaign-finance environment. Capital more concentrated and politically organized than in 1933. Labor at 10 percent. An information environment beyond the reach of a single fireside chat.
In 1933, simultaneity worked in favor of action. In 2026, simultaneity works against it. That is the political problem. It is not a complaint. It is a description.
Conditions are not destiny. They are the present state of arrangements. Arrangements have been made before, in directions no observer of the moment predicted. They can be made again.
The conditions, like the levers, are not given. They are made.

The richest man in Virginia. Sixteen plantations. Sixty-five thousand acres. More than four hundred and fifty men, women, and children inherited from a grandfather called “King.” On August 1, 1791, Robert Carter III signed a Deed of Gift naming them by mother and by age and committing to set every one of them free. It was the largest private emancipation in American history before the Civil War. His son swore to undo it. His neighbors threatened to burn his house. The Baptist preacher carrying out the manumissions was beaten in the street. Carter died in self-imposed exile and was buried in an unmarked grave at his family’s insistence. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison are on the currency. The man who proved their excuse was a lie has no monument. Robert Carter III needs to be remembered.

1850. The Fugitive Slave Act. Federal marshals can seize a free Black northerner on a white claimant’s word. Her family runs the Underground Railroad in Delaware. They cannot stay. She crosses to Canada. Three years later she founds the first newspaper in North America edited by a Black woman. Ten years after that she crosses back into the country that drove her out — not to fight, to recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army. She did neither act with permission. The state of Indiana had to issue her a letter of safe passage so she would not be arrested in transit. Her newspaper vanished from public memory until a graduate student found bound issues at the University of Pennsylvania library a century later. She broke the editorial ice for Black women in America, and helped fill a regiment the Union Army could not have built without her. Mary Ann Shadd Cary needs to be remembered.