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Macroscope | Trump and Xi made progress at the G20, but are the US and China still destined for war?
- Aidan Yao says the US’ fundamental disagreements with China’s industrial policy and trade practices haven’t changed. Both sides, and the world, still need to worry about Thucydides’ Trap leading to worsening conflict
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Between 431 and 404BC, the two major Greek powers – incumbent power Sparta and the rising Athens – waged war. This is recounted by the Athenian historian Thucydides in The History of the Peloponnesian War: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this installed in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
The dangerous dynamic of a rising power that threatens to overthrow the ruling one has been dubbed the “Thucydides’ Trap” by American political scientist Graham Allison, whose study famously reveals that, in 12 of the last 16 encounters in which a rising power confronted the ruling one, the result was war.
This was true with Athens vs Sparta and for Germany vs the UK/France more than 100 years ago. Even though the tussle between the Soviet Union and the United States did not end in an all-out military clash, it did result in an antagonistic “cold war” which lasted decades.
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That prompts the critical question of today: is the emerging tension between the US and China doomed to end in a grand conflict, or can they find a peaceful way to coexist?
The experience since the second world war has been encouraging, as the power transitions Allison identifies since then have occurred without outright conflict. Hopefully, the eventual handover of global power, whenever it happens, can occur in a peaceful manner.
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