Graham Allison

The U.S.-China bilateral is often dubbed the most important relationship in the world. Graham Allison is one of the most influential scholars in elucidating the dynamics of that relationship, with his “Thucydides Trap” thesis sparking discussion and debate among officials and analysts in Washington D.C. and Beijing. Allison spoke with The Diplomat about his recent book on the topic, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?, and what he sees as the future for U.S.-China relations as the balance of power between the two continues to shift.

The idea that conflict between a rising and a dominant power is the norm, rather than the exception, has been cited by both Chinese and U.S. officials. Does awareness of the Thucydides Trap on the part of both governments increase the odds that their countries can avoid war? Or, on the contrary, could it lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy?

One of the haunting quotes featured in the book comes from German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Asked after the First World War about how his choices, and those of other European statesmen, led to the most devastating war the world had seen to that point, the best he could offer was, “Ah, if we only knew.” Prior to World War I, many elites across Europe thought war was obsolete. One of the best-selling books in Europe in the decade before WWI was Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, which persuaded millions of readers that economic interdependence had made war irrational. Unfortunately, after seven decades without great power war, many today now imagine that this is the new normal — rather than an achievement that must be sustained every day.

My purpose in writing this book is to sound the alarm about the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. This occurred 16 times in the past 500 years, and 12 of these cases ended in war. Denying Thucydides’s Trap does not make it less real. As the line goes: reality consists of stubborn facts that do not depend on whether you believe them. Complacency about the danger adds to the risk. However, recognizing Thucydides’s Trap does not mean just accepting whatever happens. As Santayana taught us, only those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it. If we take advantage of the lessons learned from the four success stories, as well as the mistakes made in the failures, there is no reason why the U.S. and China cannot manage this relationship — even though it will be stressful, bumpy, and always at risk.

One critique of your book has been the idea that accommodation – which you pose as the escape from the Thucydides Trap – is more likely to cause war than to prevent it. Arthur Waldron countered that the “Chamberlain Trap” was in fact more dangerous than the Thucydides Trap. How would you respond?

That’s a curious critique, because I never say that accommodation is the escape from Thucydides’s Trap. So if that’s what Waldron is arguing, he missed a major point of the argument. I argue that America’s post-Cold War strategy of “engage but hedge” is fundamentally flawed — because it essentially provides a banner under which one just goes with the flow. It permits everything and precludes nothing. What has guided too much of the Washington agenda on China in recent years, and today, are grand, politically-appealing aspirations with a list of assorted actions attached. In each case, a serious strategist would conclude that the stated objective is unachievable by any level of undertaking the U.S. can reasonably mount. Current efforts are thus bound to fail, given that we face a serious competitor. So I argue for reviewing all of the strategic options, even the radical or ugly ones. To try to begin stretching our imagination, I outline an array of options that cover the spectrum from accommodation at one end to undermining the Chinese regime at the other. I also note options in between these two, including negotiating a “long peace” (similar to Pericles’s Thirty Years’ Peace between the First and Second Peloponnesian War) and redefining the relationship to focus on cooperation on mutual threats. My purpose is not to recommend any specific grand strategy, but to stir the imagination of the strategic community in the hope of stimulating a vigorous debate about a viable strategy.

It is important to note, however, that accommodation is not a bad word. Opponents seek to conflate it with appeasement (and often with Neville Chamberlain). But the two are not synonyms in the realm of strategy. Accommodation is a serious effort to adapt to a new balance of power by adjusting relations with a serious competitor, as the British did with a rising America at the turn of the 20th century. There are many differences between the U.K.-U.S. relationship then and the U.S.-China relationship today, but there is one lesson from that case that applies regardless of the strategy that the U.S. decides to take: to defend vital national interests, wise statesmen distinguish needs from wants.

You note that both the United States and China have a strong sense of their own exceptionalism, or even superiority. Given that pride on both sides, and the nationalistic tendencies of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, is compromise between these two states a realistic possibility?

Trump and Xi each personify his country’s deep aspirations of national greatness. Long before Trump came along promising to “Make America Great Again,” Xi Jinping called for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” which is another way of saying “Make China Great Again.” So in this way, the two leaders share portentous similarities. And there are a number of areas in which their interests directly clash — particularly on trade. But they also both consider themselves master dealmakers. On issues like North Korea, there may be a bargain to be struck. Xi’s highest priority ahead of this fall’s 19th Party Congress is stability, and he shares Trump’s interest in containing Kim Jong-un’s recklessness. Xi has proposed a “freeze for a freeze,” in which the North Koreans would cease nuclear and missile tests, and the Americans and South Koreans would end some military exercises. It is unclear if the Trump administration will entertain this idea, and the window of opportunity to constrain North Korea before it has the ability to attack San Francisco is closing fast.

Ultimately, I expect that the dynamic Thucydides identified will intensify in the years ahead under these two proud leaders. Xi’s “China Dream” exemplifies what I have termed “rising power syndrome,” a rising state’s enhanced sense of itself and desire for greater respect. Trump’s vilification of China, especially during the campaign, illustrates the “ruling power syndrome,” an established power’s enlarged sense of fear and insecurity as it faces intimations of “decline.” In the Greek language, exaggerated self-importance becomes hubris, and unreasonable fear, paranoia.

Most of the examples in your “Thucydides Trap case file” involve clashes between two European powers. How would you respond to the oft-heard Chinese assertion that they are culturally immune to the Thucydides Trap – that, as Xi once put it, “In Chinese blood, there is no DNA for aggression or hegemony”?

China does have a distinct strategic culture in which the use of military force is a last resort — following from Sun Tzu’s maxim, “The highest victory is to defeat the enemy without ever fighting.” But Chinese, like Americans, have a profound sense of exceptionalism. Xi’s call for “great rejuvenation” reflects a yearning for a time when China was the most powerful country in Asia. When I asked the world’s premier China watcher, Lee Kuan Yew, whether China’s current leaders sought to displace the United States as the predominant power in the region, he answered directly, “Of course. Why not? How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?”

I would also note that while the Chinese treat warfare as a tool of last resort, they have historically shown a willingness to initiate military conflict when long-term trend lines are moving against them. Taylor Fravel has pointed out that China becomes more likely to resort to force if it believes an adversary is shifting the balance of forces against it at a time of domestic unrest. In his analysis of Beijing’s attacks on India in 1962, the Soviet Union in 1969, and Vietnam in 1979, Fravel also demonstrates that China tends to use its military against opponents of comparable or greater strength. So American leaders should not be too sanguine that U.S. military superiority will deter China.

Furthermore, while Xi sometimes seeks to deny the reality of Thucydides’s Trap, at the same time he repeatedly warns about the dangers of the Trap and insists that we must make a determined effort to avoid it. In my recent conversations with government officials in Beijing, the main topic they wanted to talk about was HOW to escape Thucydides’s Trap. Indeed, Xinhua News Agency invited many of China’s leading thinkers to present their best ideas about how China can escape this trap. The collection of these essays has recently been published as a book entitled, Great Power Policy: Stepping Over “Thucydides’s Trap.” It includes essays by a variety of prominent Chinese authors, including Dai Bingguo, Fu Ying, Yan Xuetong, Yuan Peng, and Yu Hongjun.

A war between the United States and China would impact far more than these two states. What role do other regional players – from U.S. allies like Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the member states of ASEAN – play in averting or sparking war?

Historically, third parties have played a key role in triggering war between rising and ruling powers. Think about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist in June 1914, which produced a war so devastating that historians found it necessary to create an entirely new category: world war. Under conditions of Thucydidean stress, actions by third parties that would otherwise be inconsequential or easily managed can produce actions and reactions by the principal antagonists that lead to an outcome no one wanted. Think about the outcome of World War I. At the end of the war, all the key players had lost all they fought for: the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the German kaiser ousted, the Russian tsar overthrown, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its treasure and youth.

The most dangerous third party on the scene today is Kim Jong-un. Could North Korea drag China and the U.S. into a war neither wants? If that seems hard to believe, remember what happened in 1950. North Korea attacked South Korea and almost succeeded in capturing the entire peninsula. The U.S. came to the rescue at the last moment and MacArthur’s troops pushed the North Korean forces back up the peninsula, expecting to finish the job before Christmas. But as they approached the Chinese border, they awoke to find themselves under attack by 300,000 Chinese who beat them back to the 38th parallel where the war had begun. 36,000 Americans, 600,000 Chinese, and over two million Koreans perished in that war.

Could Kim Jong-un’s insistence on testing ICBMs that will give him the capability to attack San Francisco or Los Angeles lead Trump to attack North Korean launch pads? Could North Korea respond by killing a half million citizens of Seoul? Would South Korea and the U.S. retaliate by destroying the remainder of the North’s artillery and missiles capable of killing more South Koreans? And in the aftermath, which would be a second Korean War, would China enter the war rather than see the peninsula unified under a government that is a military ally of the U.S.?

Despite the title of your book, Destined for War, you argue that war between the United States and China is not, in fact, inevitable. Assuming no major changes in U.S. or Chinese strategy, how likely do you think war actually is in the next 20 years?

If leaders in Beijing and Washington just keep doing what they have been doing for the past 20 years, the odds that they stumble to war seem to me greater than even. Business as usual in this case will, I think, produce history as usual. But history also offers instructive cases in which major ruling powers managed relations with rivals, even those that threaten to overtake them, without triggering a war. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest levels in both governments. And it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions by leaders and the public alike than anyone has yet imagined.