Paul Cartledge, Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (New York: Abrams Press, 2020), p. 134:
The old problems of why the Atheno-Peloponnesian War – or wars – broke out, in 431 BCE, and of which side was really or chiefly responsible for the outbreak, have had a recent infusion of oxygen from Graham Allison’s coinage of the phrase ‘the Thucydides trap’. This notion, which postulates that an established power will be tempted, perhaps irresistibly, even ‘inevitably’, to go to war in an attempt to nip in the bud any rising power that threatens it (for example, the United States and China today and in the foreseeable future) has been applied or rather misapplied to relations between Sparta and Athens between the 470s and the 430s, and used – quite wrongly – to ‘explain’ the war’s outbreak. But by 431 both those powers – each of them had substantial permanent alliances behind them, if of very different kinds – had definitively and long since ‘risen’. Arguably, it was the older-established of the two alliances (the Spartan) that felt the more threatened by the other, and Sparta that started the war – that is, made the difference as to whether or not there would be a war at all (it did not in fact make the first attacking move). But the war was in no sense ‘inevitable’, and Thucydides does not say that it was.