Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? By Graham Allison New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017 384 pp., $18.30 ISBN-13: 978-0-54493-527-3It is conceivable that one day the United States and the People's Republic of China will go to war. There are a number of possible scenarios involving a disturbing range of countries-Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Japan, and the Koreas-that could draw the two countries into a fight. None of this is news, as tension has been evident for some time. Whether or not there is a conflict will depend on how far China pushes to assert its interests, for example in the South China Sea. In other cases, the risks revolve more around actions that might be taken by others, for example a formal secession by the Republic of China (Taiwan) from China.Graham Allison, former Director of the Belfer Center at Harvard University, describes these concerns in a lively, readable, and in some respects alarming, book. "On the current trajectory," he warns, "war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognized." Fortunately it is not "inevitable." To explain the extent of the danger he gives the niggling set of potential conflicts a wider context. Behind the particularities of the various scenarios there are three larger and related issues shaping Chinese behavior and American responses. The first is that China knows what it is like to be powerless and humiliated. Its treatment at the hands of the great powers from the late 19 th century left its mark. Now that it has economic weight, military strength, and consequential political power Beijing sees this as a time to demonstrate that the country can no longer be pushed around and that past grievances must be addressed. The second is that China has a distinctive civilization, with a culture and outlook very different from that of the Western world, which risks producing a clash of the sort described by Samuel Huntington in the early 1990s. Third, not only does China now have an opportunity to act upon its sense of grievance and entitlement but it also is coming to the point where it can push to take the leading position in the international system. Even if this is not its aim, the fact that it is no longer unrealistic raises the stakes for the United States. China has to be viewed as its most significant rival, challenging American predominance, threatening the role it has been playing since the 1940s.Allison concentrates on this feature of the developing relationship between the two great powers. It provides his big idea-the "Thucydides Trap." The idea of the trap comes from the famous explanation by the Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC: "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that it instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." These words are repeated many times throughout the book.So important is this big idea to Allison that much of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? is taken up with providing a quasi-theoretical foundation for the existence of the trap as an historical phenomenon as well as consideration of how it might apply in this case. He identifies 16 cases where a rising power came to challenge the position of a dominant state, and notes, disconcertingly, that 12 of these ended in war. Thus the danger in the current situation comes not from the very real possibility of a crisis developing over one of the known flash points but because of the historic moment as the United States confronts a fundamental challenge to its position in the international hierarchy. Allison's idea caused something of a stir since it was first mooted in an Atlantic Monthly article in 2015, and was even discussed at a summit between U.S. President Obama and President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping, when they vowed not to be trapped.It is always a good test of any theoretical proposition, whether in a Ph. …