Is war between China and the US inevitable? A new book looks to the past for answers
American political analyst Graham Allison’s thought-provoking book Destined for War ponders whether the two superpowers can avoid the precedents of history, and highlights North Korea as a potential flashpoint
In September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in Seattle to begin his first official visit to the United States. Before meetings with leaders of major companies such as Microsoft and Boeing, and, later, those in the White House, Xi gave a speech about relations between the two nations.
Among an impressive array of cultural references – from the movie Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and television series House of Cards to Ernest Hemingway – it was easy to miss a passage in which Xi name-checked Thucydides, the Greek historian who pre-dates the author of The Old Man and the Sea by some 2,500 years.
“We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias,” Xi said. “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”
Anyone wondering what a “Thucydides Trap” might be should read the new book Destined for War, by American political scientist Graham Allison, a professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, who not only coined the phrase but has extrapolated from it an entire theory concerning the rivalry between China and the US.
“I think Thucydides would have no problem in saying this looks like a classic Thucydidean dynamic,” Allison says. “In the same way that Germany and Britain were idealised Thucydidean analogues of Athens and Sparta, so too with China and the US.”
What makes a Thucydides Trap so potentially alarming, Allison argues, is that it tends to conclude with conflict. Among hostilities studied by Allison are the two world wars, the first Sino-Japanese war (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese war a decade later. Published in May, Destined for War’s sobering forecast for current Sino-American relations is that “on the current trajectory, war between the US and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but more likely than currently recognised”.