Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Excerpt

In the past two decades, International Relations scholars have heatedly debated the impact of China’s rise on China-US relations. Will China’s growing power make it more assertive in conducting relations with the US? Will a transference of power from the US to China lead it to challenge American hegemony through war? Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? offers an influential answer by going back to the Ancient Greek history. He draws out a “historical pattern” from the most oft-quoted sentence in Thucydides’s account of the origins of the war: when a state’s power is growing and threatens to surpass a ruling power, some “natural, inevitable discombobulations” between the two sides will occur and insidiously trap them into a war (p.xvi). Looking at China’s rise through this historical pattern, Allison argues that his book’s “Big Idea” is that “China and the United States are currently on [such] a collision course for war” (p.vii). …