Graham Allison, in his book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? , tackles a motif of whether China will outdo the United States to become the top superpower in the world. And if so, the question is whether America will remain silent and twiddle its thumbs. The author claims that the response to the two problems is no. Enter the Thucydides Trap is a notion from antique Greece that postulates that when an escalating power endangers replacing a ruling one, warfare is the most expected result. On the word of Allison, 12/16 comparable cases in the last 500 years have led to war. The contemporary China-United State relationship seems to be the 17th and latest instance.
Allison presents in-depth and rigorous evaluations of the 16 above-mentioned cases. The playwright details the exact influences that caused warfare in 12/16 cases and enquires the query of how—in 4/16 cases—the war was prevented. He urges the United States Government to prioritize and clarify its critical interests, instead of chasing geopolitical missions in a remote area of the world which are not essentially of utmost importance to American welfares. Also, the writer claims that the United States must try to comprehend China’s internal dynamics in a better way, instead of seeing it as a state whose crucial welfares reflect America’s, and must highlight domestic matters as the key effort.
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Some of the very-recent figures and facts of the contemporary Chinese military and economic machine that the playwright encompasses may make the inexperienced audience feel rather outdated, merely because they function to show the country’s dramatic rise in the past numerous decades. For instance, the author draws a comparison between China and the U.S. on four sums, paralleling the year 1980 to 2015 with the Chinese financial statistics as a proportion of United States numbers in terms of the raw value (Allison, 2015).
In spite of the thorough research carried out, and presented in the book, which backs up the author’s claim, the actual nature of his claim, that warfare between a period’s leading power and an expanding power is virtually unavoidable, could be more narrowly examined. To begin with, in contemporary times, both China and the U.S. are likely to be justly reasonable regarding their army-associated decision-making. Neither party could be enthusiastic to participate in any ruthless warfare with one another. The two parties surely understand the possible outcome of a likely conflict.
Additionally, of the instances Allison quotes, 2/4 examples when warfare was successfully prevented are from the atomic era—from the year 1940s going on, when the universe had come to comprehend, post-WWII, the huge disparaging capacity of atomic bombs. The 12 other examples when warfare was truly the consequence, were instances where not any of the fighting countries had atomic weapons (Long, 2019). In a unified global village of today, intercontinental communications are perhaps more successful, on numerous levels, in preventing such warfare.
Lastly, the twenty-first-century realm is multipolar. China and the U.S. might be the most dominant huge powers in global affairs nowadays, but there remain certainly other economically or militarily powerful countries which can arbitrate if strains intensify between the two nations. Now, nine countries are nuclear powers, and some have international flying missile ability, with Russia owning the most of such armaments (Buruma, 2017). Therefore, the key proposition of Allison’s text that China and the U.S. are possibly destined for warfare, as history infers, might seem to emerge from excessive alarms and might not be accurate.
Nonetheless, despite its few shortcomings, Destined for War is a recommendable bit of historical exploration with a fascinating theory. The author’s style of writing is appealing too. Nevertheless, the concept suggests is undoubtedly not the solitary feasible lens via which to see the future path of global affairs and U.S.- China relations.
References
Allison, G. (2015). The Thucydides trap: are the U.S. and China headed for war?. The Atlantic , 24 .
Buruma, I. (2017). Are China and the United States Headed for War?. New Yorker , 19 .
Long, T. (2019). What do past power transitions reveal about whether the U.S. and China are headed for war?
