Matt Bevan

He's been arranging his pawns, moving his knights and bishops and rooks into position.

why well xi jinping is rather taken by a concept called the thucydides trap so-called thucydides trap which is all about thucydides trap again i don't want to fall in into the thucydides trap it's a bit of a favorite topic among a certain type of australian prime minister the prime minister may yet again wheel out his greek mythology lesson on the thucydides trap this is the so-called thucydides trap

So let's hear former PM Kevin Rudd's explanation for what it is.

Now, this idea wasn't popularised by slightly overconfident and mildly pretentious Australian prime ministers, however.

It was popularized by historian Graham Allison.

So a rising power challenges a declining power, and that leads to war.

Three quarters of the time, apparently, over the last 500 years.

Xi Jinping is even more obsessed with this theory than Turnbull and Rudd, so much so that he brought it up in his recent summit with Donald Trump.

The world has reached a new crossroads.

Can China and the United States move beyond the so-called Thucydides trap?

For Xi Jinping, the theory of the Thucydides trap has given him a to-do list.

Conflict between the two powers is likely, so he wants to be prepared if it happens.

The problem for Xi Jinping is that Thucydides' trap theory is based on conflicts between great powers over the last five centuries.

But it's worth noting that since World War II, there have been no direct conflicts between great powers at all.

That's because the invention of nuclear weapons and a globalised economy actually makes going to war directly illogical.

You can't attack the other superpower without destroying yourself too.

Mutually assured destruction has dismantled the Thucydides trap.

But despite this, Xi Jinping keeps preparing for a conflict that he thinks is inevitable.

So why?

Well I'm pretty pleased with the chess metaphor running through this episode so far and fortunately there's a chess term for this strategy.