trap

WE ALL know holidays are expensive, and costs can rack up faster than a flight from Southend to Newquay.

So, as a seasoned travel journalist, it really pains me to see holidaymakers shelling out over the odds, and unnecessarily so, on their once-a-year summer break.

By all means, this holiday is your time to celebrate. Have a 6am pint in the airport ‘Spoons (sorry to Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, but I disagree with banning pre-flight beers) and sure, treat yourself to that pair of sandals you’ve been eyeing up in Duty Free.

But why are you still wasting your hard-earned cash on an aeroplane lunch?

I just can’t fathom it. And it’s not because I’m a food snob. 

The other week on an easyJet flight back from Greece, the young lad next to me was practically jumping out of his seat in anticipation of the trolley to edge our way.

I thought he was gagging for a drink, but it turns out he was after the cheeseburger (who knew easyJet even sold cheeseburgers?).

But sadly, this lad never got his gnashers on that beef patty as they’d sold out already.

“Ugh, I’d been looking forward to that all day,” he muttered to his partner.

I raised an eyebrow. What had the breakfast buffet been like at his hotel if he’d been craving this floppy-looking easyJet cheeseburger “ALL day”? 

He wasn’t the only one in an ordering frenzy during this flight, either.

Looking around me, I’d say at least half – if not more – of the passengers had ordered their lunch on board, along with drinks and snacks.

This wasn’t entirely a shock to me. On another short-haul flight I took earlier this year, the plane food had proved equally popular.

And although there aren’t any hard stats to back this up, colleagues have said they’ve experienced the same; it seems Brits really love their on-board grub.

Selfishly, I was a little relieved that my neighbour didn’t get his burger, as I’m not sure I fancied inhaling the stench of microwaved meat for the final few moments of my journey.

I mean no disrespect to easyJet, either.

Other airlines I’ve travelled on can’t rustle up a better lunch, even the pricier and fancier carriers.

That’s simply because they don’t have the equipment on board, nor the space to carry fresh ingredients.

There isn’t a chef up in the galley scorching tender steak on an open flame, because, well… health and safety.

It’s not necessarily the poor quality that I can’t stomach, though. It’s the extortionate price tag.

It would have cost the fella next to me £7.50 for the burger alone. No chips. No side salad. No drink.

And judging by the menu picture, it looked smaller than a bacon bap from Greggs.

I’m not saying you have to pre-make the entire family a set of sad sandwiches at home, but you can pick up some pretty decent bites at the airport these days.

Plus, these airport meals won’t cost you as much as the food on board the plane.

While matey next to me disappointedly tucked into his ham and cheddar toastie (a more reasonable £5.75) and his partner, the lasagne (£7.95), I was ripping open the paper to my huge spinach and feta-stuffed filo pastry. 

I’d picked up this local bite from a cafe in the airport, just after security, for under £4.50.

Said cafe had sandwiches, too, as well as crisps and snacks – all of which were cheaper and more generously sized than the on-board grub. 

And that was just at a teeny airport in Greece – at larger airports, you’re spoiled for choice.

If you’ve left a sensible amount of time to bag drop and get through security, then you’ll also have time to kill on the other side. Grabbing a meal is the perfect way to do that. 

To those who insist on eating while sitting on the plane, I say: just get a takeaway.

Sack off your aeroplane sarnie and pick up a Boots meal deal, which includes a sandwich or main meal, snack and a drink for less than the price of one sandwich on board.

At Heathrow airport, a Boots meal deal comes in at an inflated (but still more affordable than food on board) price of £5.50 – and the quality of what you’re getting really doesn’t differ that much.

Or if you really fancy a slap-up meal, a lot of airport Wetherspoons offer takeaway versions of their dishes, meaning you can order a sit-down meal just before boarding your flight.

You don’t need to leave things to chance, either.

Generally speaking, you can look up what restaurants and takeaway options there are in the airport before you arrive. 

It’s also well worth taking advantage of the Too Good To Go app that lets you collect a “surprise bag” of goodies from an airport cafe or restaurant. 

You’ll have to log in and buy the bag in advance, but it can save you a fair whack of cash.

For example, if I were flying from Heathrow this evening, I could pick up a mixed bag of pastries for just £2.69, a fraction of what they would normally cost.

Or if I were travelling from Gatwick tomorrow morning, I could pick up a brekkie bag from Pure cafe for a fiver, containing two to three items such as toasties, porridge and egg muffins.

That’s almost enough for the whole family.

When the ancient Greek historian Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War, he did not write only about the clash between Athens and Sparta. He documented the fate of the small city-states caught between them in 431BC. Corcyra and Potidaea, neutral territories with no grand strategy of their own, were crushed, annexed, or forced into allegiance as the two great powers dragged the entire Greek world into conflict.

Thucydides famously wrote that it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable. Yet for the smaller states, there was no trap to escape. There was only destruction when great powers fought. This forgotten truth frames the most dangerous bilateral relationship on earth today.

When President Xi Jinping invoked the Thucydides Trap during his May 2026 summit with President Donald Trump in Beijing, he framed it as a question between two great powers asking whether China and the US can rise above the so-called Thucydides Trap and create a new framework for major-power relations. The concept was popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who identified sixteen historical cases over the past five hundred years where a rising power challenged an established one, with twelve ending in war. Allison’s framework casts China as the rising Athens and the US as the established Sparta. It centers on whether these two great powers can avoid destroying each other, while leaving less examined what happens to the smaller states caught in between. At the summit, President Xi warned that if mishandled the two countries could clash or even enter into conflict, leading the entire China-US relationship into a highly dangerous scenario. He emphasized that the Taiwan issue is the most critical matter in their bilateral relation, implicitly acknowledging that miscalculation could materialize the very trap he warned against.

The competition between the US and China has grown far beyond trade into something that locks other countries into its orbit. What started as a tariff dispute has become overlapping conflicts across technology, finance, energy, and data governance, each one reinforcing the others and closing off neutral ground. This creates a situation close to a legal Catch-22 where China’s Ministry of Commerce used its blocking statute for the first time in May 2026 against US sanctions and put multinational companies in a position where following Washington’s extraterritorial rules meant breaking Beijing’s laws and following Beijing’s rules meant breaking Washington’s. This is not a byproduct of the competition but is becoming the competition itself.

US bans on advanced semiconductors and AI chips combined with Chinese limits on gallium, germanium, and rare earths along with rival payment systems like China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which provides cross-border payment services to more than 5,000 banking institutions across 190 countries and regions as an alternative to Western banking rails and clashing visions of internet sovereignty have built up into a tightly connected system where doing business globally increasingly means either choosing a side or paying escalating costs for staying neutral, with the heaviest pressure in tech and finance while other domains retain more space for hedging. These costs hit hardest not the US or China but the countries and firms that have no power over either. China-US trade, technology, and regulatory pressures have repeatedly spilled over into third countries, and Southeast Asia has often been caught in the middle. Vietnam has faced US scrutiny over goods assembled with Chinese-linked inputs, Cambodia experienced significant trade diversion during the 2018 US-China trade war, Malaysia came under pressure to tighten controls on semiconductor shipments, and Singapore has had to navigate the compliance burdens created by competing US and Chinese rules.

More broadly, small states across the globe must navigate between two major powers, leaning toward China for economic reasons and toward the US for security reasons. ASEAN has long relied on non-alignment and hedging to preserve, and of course expand, room to maneuver if possible, but intensifying US-China competition is narrowing that room. Some states have turned rivalry into opportunity. Vietnam has attracted manufacturing shifts and foreign investment as companies diversify supply chains away from China. India, Gulf states, and others actively play both sides or carve strategic niches, extracting economic benefits while maintaining security partnerships. Yet these adaptive strategies have limits, and the space for maneuvering narrows as competition intensifies, leaving smaller states with growing pressure, higher compliance costs, and reduced autonomy.

The relationship between China and the US remains the world’s most dangerous bilateral relationship not because President Xi and President Trump might make war on each other but because small countries worldwide will be the first casualties when that war comes or even when competition intensifies. The real Thucydides Trap is not whether America and China can avoid war with each other but whether small states can survive the rivalry even if both of them somehow manage peaceful coexistence. As fence sitting becomes tense and the legal arms race traps countries in impossible dilemmas, more countries face choices that progressively erode the strategic autonomy they have long relied on. Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War with eyes on all participants including the allies of Athens and Sparta who became victims of the trap. The lesson from ancient Greece is very clear that when great powers fight the weak do not survive, and the stories of Corcyra and Potidaea matter just as much as the struggle between Athens and Sparta.

When Athens and Sparta finally went to war, the first thing that died was the freedom of everyone caught between them. The US and China may or may not escape their trap but regional powers, developing nations, and many other small countries already know themselves to be inside it.