Are the world’s two most powerful nations heading towards a Thucydides Trap? Harvard Professor
Graham Allison sees the US and China stumbling into the same dynamic that led to the Peloponnesian wars and that repeated itself between a rising England versus the Dutch Republic in the 1600s, a rising Germany versus Britain in the early 1900s and a rising Japan versus the US in the 1940s.
Warning lights of an inevitable war between China and the US are flashing red. The
tit-for-tat tariffs threaten to become a full-blown
trade war that could cripple the global economy. Following US President Donald Trump’s ban on the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker
ZTE, the trade dispute has become more complex, revealing a broader critical landscape in which the US pushes back against China’s advancement into the global electronics value chain.
Moreover, tensions over the
South China Sea point to the strong likelihood of a regional military conflict. US Defence Secretary
Jim Mattis warned last week of “much larger consequences” if China continues to militarise disputed islands.
Both the outcome of the Peloponnesian wars and basic economics suggest that any such conflict would result in the worst kind of disruption to the global economy. However, the world is a very different place from ancient Greece and pre-second-world-war era.
Today, all-out war between large powers have become unlikely as the nature of the economy has changed and present-day military technology would make it extremely difficult to replicate the second world war feats. Moreover, in an interconnected world, the damage inflicted by a major war between large powers would go beyond that to the two countries alone.
Averting the Thucydides Trap requires both the US and China to focus on commonalities and find ways to deal with their differences. Regardless of ideological and geopolitical frictions, the two countries need to work together on
global governance to tackle common challenges: building a permanent peace mechanism on the
Korean peninsula, finding solutions to
terrorism and the
refugee crisis, helping to maintain balanced global economic growth and creating an international environmental regime.
