Other posts of the series here:
1 - Evidence for a limit to human lifespan
2 - The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research
3 - Hubris Syndrome: How Power Corrupts
Hey there!
What I am presenting today may not be considered a scientific paper but a published book by a political scientist named Graham Allison. His book is called Destined for War: can America and China escape Thucydides's Trap?.
First of all: who is Thucydides and what he has to do with USA and China?
Thucydides was the greatest of ancient Greek historians and has been dubbed the father of History. He wrote the first history book! That book was Peloponnesian War, which recounts the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC.
In that book, Thucydides explained that the rise of a new power (Athens) and the reaction of another (Sparta) created a toxic cocktail of pride, arrogance and paranoia. The result of this competition lead them both to war.
With this in mind, the author created the term Thucydides Trap. Thucydides Trap is the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, like Athens, or Germany 100 years ago, or China today and their impact on Sparta, or Great-Britain 100 years ago or the USA today.
Now you can look through the news of the day and try to understand what's actually going on with the world with this new concept of Thucydides Trap.
And as you look through the news, a fundamental question may occur: are we going to follow the footsteps of history or we will find a way to manage rivalries?
According to Allison, statistically, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the most likely outcome is war.
Harvard's "Thucydides's Trap Case File" has reviewed the last 500 years of history and found 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. Twelve of these ended in war as you can see here:
Using the cases, Allison illustrates how tension between rising and ruling powers has often led to war. And the stunning fact is that in very few of these did either of the protagonists want a war and few of these wars were initiated by either the rising power or the ruling power. What happens is a third party's provocation that forces one or the other to react, and that sets in motion a spiral which drags the two to a war they don't want.
It seems crazy but remember World War I. The provocation, in that case, was the assassination of a second-level figure, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Today, an irresistible rising China is on course to collide with an immovable America. China challenges America’s predominance and misunderstandings about each other’s actions and intentions could lead them into the deadly Thucydides Trap.
Behind this meteoric growth of China, there is a purpose-driven leader and a government that works. I dare to say that the most ambitious and most competent leader on the international stage today is Chinese President Xi Jinping. China is already well on its way to the top.
The brute facts are hard to ignore and Graham Allison has put forward a great theory. It just has one minor flaw, it fails to sufficiently explain why the last three power struggles didn't result in war.
Of the cases in which war was averted — Spain outstripping Portugal in the late 15th century, the United States overtaking the United Kingdom at the turn of the 20th century, and Germany’s rise in Europe since 1990, a surge of strategic imagination helped both sides develop ways to compete without a catastrophic conflict when a violent clash seemed certain.
So, are Americans and Chinese going to let the forces of history drive us to a war catastrophic for both, or are we going to find a way to survive together and maybe share the leadership in the 21st century?
References:
Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, Published May 30th 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
1st Image: Javid Husain, www.csspmspk.com/thucydidess-trap, accessed 26 of November 2018
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