> Essentially its a very old (~2.5k year) idea that the interaction between an incumbent power and rising "challenger" power inevitably leads to war between the two.
It sounds plausible, but if it is this old there must be a long list of examples. What are some of them?
As LarsDu88 mentioned above, its actually not this old. The idea is recent but is based on an ancient conflict. That is my mistake. The wiki article has interesting info on the examples that the originator saw:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap