The Chamberlain Trap

There is no Thucydides Trap.

Appeasement of aggressors is far more dangerous than measured confrontation. 

Book review: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, by Graham Allison (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017)
By Arthur Waldron

Arthur Waldron is a notable scholar of Chinese history and military affairs. In this book review, he argues persuasively against a fallacious concept that has become a pillar of establishment thinking on China.

In 1938, Chamberlain led the European chorus to appease Hitler by agreeing to his expansionist plans. The Munich Agreement served Hitler with Czechoslovakia on a silver platter. Chamberlain was naive enough to proclaim that the agreement had brought "peace in our time."
79 years after, Donald Trump tried to appease Xi Jinping

Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Professor Ernst Badian of Harvard, long ago proved that no such thing exists as the “Thucydides Trap,” certainly not in the actual Greek text of the great History of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps the greatest single work of history ever.
Astonishingly, even the names of these two towering academic giants are absent from the index of this baffling academic farrago. 

It was penned by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor — associated with the Kennedy School of Government — to whom questions along the lines of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Homer?” should be addressed.
Allison’s argument draws on one sentence of Thucydides’s text: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian Power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” 

This lapidary summing up of an entire argument is justly celebrated. 

It introduced to historiography the idea that wars may have “deep causes,” that resident powers are tragically fated to attack rising powers. 

It is brilliant and important, no question, but is it correct?
Clearly not for the Peloponnesian War. 

Generations of scholars have chewed over Thucydides’s text. 

Every battlefield has been measured. 

The quantity of academic literature on the topic is overwhelming, dating as far back as 1629 when Thomas Hobbes produced the first English translation.
In the present day, Kagan wrote four volumes in which he modestly but decisively overturned the idea of the Thucydides Trap. 

Badian did the same.
The problem is that although Thucydides presents the war as started by the resident power, Sparta, out of fear of a rising Athens, he makes it clear first that Athens had an empire, from which it wished to eliminate any Spartan threat by stirring up a war and teaching the hoplite Spartans that they could never win. 

The Spartans, Kagan tells us, wanted no war, preemptive or otherwise. 

Dwelling in the deep south, they lived a simple country life that agreed with them. 

They used iron bars for money and lived on bean soup when not practicing fighting, their main activity. 

Athens’s rival Corinth, which also wanted a war for her own reasons, taunted the young Spartans into unwonted bellicosity such that they would not even listen to their king, Archidamus, who spoke eloquently against war. 

Once started, the war was slow to catch fire. 

Archidamus urged the Athenians to make a small concession — withdraw the Megarian Decree, which embargoed a small, important state — and call it a day. 

But the Athenians rejected his entreaties. 

Then plague struck Athens, killing, among others, the leading citizen Pericles.
Both Kagan and Badian note that the reason that the independent states of Hellas, including Athens and Sparta, had lived in peace became clear. 

Although their peoples were not acquainted, their leaders formed a web of friendship that managed things. 

The plague eliminated Pericles, the key man in this peace-keeping mechanism. 

Uncontrolled popular passions took over, and the war was revived, invigorated. 

It would end up destroying Athens, which had started it. 

Preemption would have been an incomprehensible concept to the Spartans, but war was not, and when the Athenians forced them into one, they ended up victors. 

The whole Thucydides Trap — not clear who coined this false phrase — does not exist, even in its prime example.

So now we can turn to the hash Allison makes of the unfamiliar material he has chosen.
Ignoring all this, Allison takes Thucydides literally: Wars (sometimes) begin when rising powers like Athens threaten established powers like Sparta. 

But do they really? 

The case is difficult to make. 

Japan was the rising power in 1904 while Russia was long established. Did Russia therefore seek to preempt Japan? 

No. 

The Japanese launched a surprise attack on Russia, scuttling the Czar’s fleet. 

In 1941, the Japanese were again the rising power. Did ever-vigilant America strike out to eliminate the Japanese threat? 

Wrong. 

Roosevelt considered it “infamy” when Japan surprised him by attacking Pearl Harbor at a time when the world was already in flames. 

Switch to Europe — in the 1930s, Germany was obviously the rising, menacing power. 

Did France, Russia, England, and the other threatened powers move against it? 

They could not even form an alliance, so the USSR eventually joined Hitler rather than fight him. 

Exceptions there are, and Allison makes a half-baked effort to find them, but these are not the mainstream. 

Is this some kind of immense academic lapse?
No. 

What has really happened is that Allison has caught China fever, not hard around Harvard, although knowing no Chinese language and little Chinese history.
As a result, Allison seems to have been impressed above all by Chinese numbers: population, army size, growth rate, steel production, etc. 

So if that sentence from Thucydides is correct, then China is clearly a rising power that will want her “place in the sun” — which will lead ineluctably to a collision between rising China (Athens) instigated by the presumably setting U.S. (Sparta), which will see military preemption as the only recourse to avert a loss of power and a Chinese-dominated world. 

To escape this trap, Allison demands that we must find a way to give China what she wants and forget the lessons of so many previous wars. 

Many of Allison’s colleagues at Harvard also believe this to be true.
The reality, however, is that Allison’s recipe is actually a recipe for war. 

Appeasement of aggressors is far more dangerous than measured confrontation. 

Did China become more aggressive in the South China Sea in the 2000s because the Obama administration got tougher or because it went AWOL on the issue? 

I’d say the latter is more likely. 

When it comes to China, we might want to be more mindful of the “Chamberlain Trap” after the peace-loving prime minister of England, one of the authors of the disastrous 1938 Munich agreement that sought to avoid war by concessions, which in fact taught Hitler that the British were easily fooled. 

That is the trap we are in urgent need of avoiding.
As an intellectual exercise, let us try making the modest substitution in Allison’s argument of Europe for China. 

Europe — excluding Russia and some other, smaller, countries — has a land area of 3.9 million square miles, which is to say larger than the U.S. at 3.79 million. 

The European Union GDP is roughly $20 trillion (nominal) while that of the United States perhaps $1 trillion less. 

Europe had 1,823,000 forces in uniform in 2014, compared with 1,031,000 for the United States today.
Where am I going? 

If we add educational and technical levels as well as standard of living, one might be forgiven for thinking that, by the numbers, Europe, not China, was the leading potential challenger to the United States. 

That of course is what the late Jean-Jacques Servan-Schrieber argued in his immensely popular and influential bit of futurology Le Défi Américan [“The American Challenge”] in 1967. 

It may well be that the great, almost unspoken question of this century is the future of Europe. 

So far, however, Europe and America have not proven “destined to war.”
Nor are America and China. 

My late colleague and mentor Ambassador James Lilley liked to recall a lecture given by an American professor about Taiwan. 

The speaker became increasingly heated, declaring that unless Washington immediately yielded to Beijing’s demands about Taiwan, a nuclear war was unavoidable. 

A PLA general in attendance was at first puzzled, and then agitated. 

He turned to the ambassador to whisper a question: “Who is this guy? Does he think we are crazy?” In other words, come whatever, we Chinese are intelligent enough to realize that war — not to mention nuclear war — with the United States would be an insane action that would destroy all China has achieved in the years since Mao’s death in 1976. 

As I see it, it’s far more likely, but certainly not as sexy, to believe that there will be no “destined” war between China and the U.S. because the Chinese might actually have a clearer reading of history than the scholars at Harvard.
Allison’s book is chock-a-block with facts.
And the impressive statistics of China’s growth in military power that Allison cites are real. 

So are its advances in technology.
Furthermore, since 1995, two years before Deng Xiaoping’s death, Beijing simply used military force to seize a maritime formation called “Mischief Reef” from the Philippines — a clear reversal of Deng’s policy of always maintaining good relations with the United States. 

By 2012, China had occupied the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal as well, and continues to do so, while fortifying and creating islands in the South China Sea, where long runways were built for military aircraft, rockets deployed, submarines anchored, and in the East China Sea promulgating an Air Defense Identification Zone that just happened to include one Korean island China would like, and another group of such Japanese islands.
In other words, since Ambassador Lilley took his friend to hear the American professor, Chinese policy seems to have changed, but how much, and more importantly, why?
Since the attack on Scarborough Shoal, now six years ago, my own opinion is that China expected to have occupied a lot more.
Her slightly delusional view of her claims, first made explicit in ASEAN’s winter meeting of 2010 in Hanoi, was that “small” countries would all bow respectfully to China’s new preeminence. 
This has failed to occur. 
All of China’s neighbors are now building up strong military capabilities. 
Japanese and South Korean nuclear weapons are even a possibility. 
Overrelying on their traditional concept of awesomeness (威 wēi), the Chinese expected a cakewalk. They have got instead an arms race with neighbors including Japan and other American allies and India, too. 
With so much firepower now in place, the danger of accident, pilot error, faulty command and control, etc. must be considered.
But I’d wager that the Chinese would smother an unintended conflict. 
They are, after all, not idiots.
Allison also provides us with a mélange of statistics showing the great industrial might of China.
She produces tons of steel, more than markets can absorb, likewise coal, while serving as the workshop of the world where the computer on which I am writing was manufactured.
The mountains of Chinese exports that have shuttered manufacturing in America seem, like the American powerhouse of 50 years ago, set to overwhelm the world rather as Servan-Schreiber expected American-owned business to do in Europe — but did not.
China’s tremendous economic vulnerabilities have no mention in Allison’s book. 
But they are critical to any reading of China’s future.
China imports a huge amount of its energy and is madly planning a vast expansion in nuclear power, including dozens of reactors at sea.
She has water endowments similar to Sudan, which means nowhere near enough.
The capital intensity of production is very high: In China, one standard energy unit used fully produces 33 cents of product.
In India, the figure is 77 cents.
Gradually climb and you get to $3 in Europe and then — in Japan — $5.55.
China is poor not only because she wastes energy but water, too, while destroying her ecology in a way perhaps lacking any precedent. 
Figures such as these are very difficult to find: Mine come from researchers in the energy sector. Solving all of this, while making the skies blue, is a task of both extraordinary technical complexity and expense that will put China’s competing special interests at one another’s throats.
Not solving, however, will doom China’s future.
Allison may know this on some level, but you have to spend a lot of time in China and talk to a lot of specialists (often in Chinese) before the enormity becomes crushingly real.
What’s more, Chinese are leaving China in unprecedented numbers. 
The late Richard Solomon, who worked on U.S.-China relations for decades, remarked to me a few weeks before his death that “one day last year all the Chinese who could decided to move away.” Why?
The pollution might kill your infants; the hospitals are terrible, the food is adulterated, the system corrupt and unpredictable. 
Here in the Philadelphia suburbs and elsewhere, thousands of Chinese buyers are flocking to buy homes in cash.
Even Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. 
Does that imply a high-profile political career for her in China?
Probably not.
It rather implies a quiet retirement with Xi’s grandchildren over here. 
Our American private secondary schools are inundated by Chinese applicants.
For the first time this year, my Chinese graduate students are marrying one another and buying houses here.
This is a leading indicator.
If it could be done, the coming tsunami would bring 10 million highly qualified Chinese families to the U.S. in 10 years — along with fleeing crooks, spies, and other flotsam and jetsam. 
Even Xi’s first wife fled China; she lives in England.
Allison, however, misses this; “immigration” is not in his index. 
Instead, he speculates about war, based on some superficial reading and sampling of the literature, coming to the question “What does Xi want?” — which I take as meaning that he thinks Xi’s opinion matters — which makes nonsense of the vast determining waves of economic development, not to mention his glance at Thucydides — with the opinion following that somehow we should try to find out what that is and cut a deal. 
This is geopolitics from a Harvard professor?
This is the great wave of history?
How to conclude a look at so ill conceived and sloppily executed a book? 
Do not blame Allison. 
The problem is the pervasive lack of knowledge of China — a country which is, after all, run by the Communist Party, the police, and the army, and thus difficult to get to know.
This black hole of information has perversely created an overabundance of fantasies, some very pessimistic, some as absurdly bright as a foreigner on the payroll can make them.
Forget the fantasies, therefore, and look at the facts.
In the decades ahead, China will have to solve immense problems simply to survive. 
Neither her politics nor her economy follow any rules that are known.
The miracle, like the German Wirtschaftswunder and the vertical ascent of Japan, is already coming to an end.
A military solution offers only worse problems. 

The Necessary War

America’s Collision Course With China
By JUDITH SHAPIRO

EVERYTHING UNDER THE HEAVENS
How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power
By Howard W. French
Illustrated. 330 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

DESTINED FOR WAR
Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
By Graham Allison
364 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books. $28.


The Chinese superpower has arrived. 

Could America’s failure to grasp this reality pull the United States and China into war? 

Here are two books that warn of that serious possibility.
Howard W. French’s “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power” does so through a deep historical and cultural study of the meaning of China’s rise from the point of view of the Chinese themselves. 

Graham Allison’s “Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides’s Trap” makes his arguments through historical case studies that illuminate the pressure toward military confrontation when a rising power challenges a dominant one. 

Both books urge us to be ready for a radically different world order, one in which China presides over Asia, even as Chinese politicians tell a public story about “peaceful rise.” 

French says in his exhaustively researched and fascinating account of geopolitics, China style, that the Chinese era is upon us. 

But, he asks, “How will the coming China-driven world look?” 

To what extent will China support the international order that emerged when it was suffering humiliation at the hands of foreign powers? 

What are the drivers and motivations for the new ways China projects its power? 

How best should its neighbors and its rival North American superpower respond?

French, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues that China’s historical and cultural legacy governs its conduct of international relations, a legacy that sits uncomfortably with the Western notions of equality and noninterference among states. 

China’s relations with its neighbors in Japan and Southeast Asia were for millenniums governed by the concept of tianxia, which held that everything “under the heavens” belonged to the empire. 

A "superior" civilization demanded deference and tribute from vassal neighbors and did not hesitate to use military force. 

China’s testy relationship with Vietnam became fraught whenever a Vietnamese leader dared to demand equal footing with a Chinese emperor; the Japanese claim to divine origins was unacceptable.

When China lost its regional dominance at the hands of colonial powers and invading armies, it saw the situation as temporary. 

The struggle in the East China Sea over the Senkaku Islands claimed by Japan since 1895, for example, has long been a sore point in Sino-Japanese relations. 

But the reform-era strongman Deng Xiaoping advised China to “hide our capacities and bide our time” on this and many other issues. 

Hostility between China and Japan simmers in disputes over hierarchy, wartime apology and historical narrative, with the two “in a situation resembling galaxies locked in each other’s gravitational fields, destined to collide repeatedly only to sail past each other after wreaking their damage.” 

French shows convincingly that China’s goal is now to displace the American "barbarians" and correct historic humiliations imposed by those who dethroned China from its rightful position at the center of the world.
China’s recent spectacular land grab in the South China Sea is a fait accompli, given China’s superior power in the area and its assertion that the region is a core national interest. 

Arbitrators for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea issued a 500-plus-page decision against China and in favor of the Philippines in a dispute over the definitions of islands versus rock formations; they concluded that Chinese arguments had no legal basis. 

But China has unilaterally determined to claim much of the sea as its own. 

The country rejected the arbitration tribunal, knowing that its growing surface naval power and nuclear submarine capability support a highly uneven contest. 

Oil rigs have been established in contested waters, while artificial “islands” constructed from coral reefs are serving as military bases just miles from the Southeast Asian coastline. 

Similarly, China’s projection of economic might through the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and One Belt, One Road initiative, which intends to bind a huge swath of Asia to China economically via new land infrastructure and consolidated control of the seas, generates “a kind of fatalism or resignation about the futility of trying to defy it.”

“Everything Under the Heavens” is splendidly elucidated by a series of maps that show the world from China’s perspective; the South China Sea is compared to a cow’s tongue or “enormous blue banner” that can be drawn as a logical continuation of China’s southeastern coastline. 

French’s book was written before Trump’s repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, but clearly the resulting power vacuum is nothing short of a gift to an empire bent on restoring its tributary realm.

Graham Allison’s “Destined for War,” also helpfully illustrated with maps and charts, reinforces French’s arguments with wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history. 

The book asks why, when a new superpower threatens to displace a ruling power, the clash of hubris and paranoia often results in war. 

Allison’s examples include the Sparta-Athens conflict of the famous “Thucydides trap,” when both sides labored strenuously to avoid war but were seemingly driven to it by forces beyond their control, as well as Germany’s challenge to the dominance of its neighbors at the start of the 20th century, which led to two world wars. 

Allison’s 16 cases also include four examples of power shifts in which war was avoided, as when Britain adjusted to the rise of the United States in the Great Rapprochement of the turn of the last century, choosing forbearance and eventually reaping great rewards through the countries’ “special relationship.”

Allison, the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, resurrects the Samuel Huntington thesis of a coming clash of civilizations to explain that China thinks in longer time frames and with a greater sense of hierarchy than the United States. 

In order to avoid the Thucydides trap, he writes, American policy makers must reject the tendency to think that China is like us and that it will respond as we would to identical provocations. 

Numerous situations could spark military conflict between the United States and China despite efforts on both sides to maintain peace, from accidental collisions at sea to misunderstandings caused by cyberattacks to actions taken by third parties like North Korea or Taiwan. 

“Will it be more difficult for the Chinese to rationalize a cosmology in which there are two ‘suns,’ or for the U.S. to accept that it must live with another, and possibly superior superpower?” 

Allison asks in a discussion of the need for both sides to bring their brightest minds to the challenge ahead.
Both of these fine books show that China intends to evict the United States from Asia in order to restore its dominance over what it considers its historic spheres of influence. 

Unfortunately, Washington is poorly prepared to deal with a China that strategizes in terms of the symbolic undercurrents and sensitivities illuminated so dramatically by both French and Allison. Whether the resurgence of China will mean tragedy in the form of armed conflict will depend on how China, China’s neighbors and the United States understand and manage the deeper motivations and structural forces in play.

The Necessary War

A scholar-analyst makes a historical case for a U.S.-China war. 
By Albert R. Hunt

The wisdom of war

Before settling in for pleasurable summer books, read Graham Allison's "Destined for War: Can American and China escape Thucydides's Trap?"
It starts with the Athenian historian's chronicle of the conflict between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century B.C. as a way to tackle the larger question of whether war can be averted when an aggressive rising nation threatens a dominant power. 

Allison, a renowned Harvard University scholar and national security expert, studied 16 such cases over the past 500 years; in 12 there was war.
For three-quarters of a century, the U.S. has been the dominant world power. 

China is now challenging that hegemony economically, politically and militarily. 

Both countries, with vastly different political systems, histories and values, believe in their own exceptionalism.
The two nations, Allison argues, are "currently on a collision course for war."

He's been sweeping in and out of government, serving five Republican and Democratic administrations from Washington and his perch at Harvard. 

He's a first-class academic with the instincts of a first-rate politician. 

He brings to the "Thucydides Trap" an impressive sweep of history and geopolitical and military knowledge. 

Unlike some academics, he writes interestingly.
Allison analyzes why so many rising powers ended up in wars with established ones, and why some didn't. 

The best contemporary examples are the German rise that led to World War I contrasted with the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which was kept from escalating into hot war for more than four decades.
In the early part of the 20th century, the U.K. was threatened by an emerging Germany, which had been unified decades before by Bismarck, and which was blowing past Britain economically and moving up on its naval dominance. 

The political leaders in the U.K., Allison writes, were beset by anxieties and Germany emboldened by ambition. 

Mutual mistrust, an arms race and World War I followed.
After World War II, facing the menacing challenge from the Soviet Union, the U.S. fashioned the policy of containment, starting with the extraordinary Marshall Plan to rebuild war-ravaged allies and adversaries. 

With smart diplomats and presidents, from John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis through Ronald Reagan's engagement with Mikhail Gorbachev, war was averted before the Soviet Union collapsed.
The rise of China offers a classic Thucydides trap. 

In 1980, China's economy was only a tenth the size of the U.S. economy. 

By 2040, Allison reckons, it could be three times larger. 

China considers itself the most important power in Asia, irrespective of U.S. commitments and alliances with allies in the region. 

With Donald Trump presiding over a White House hostile to international institutions, Xi Jinping has at least a claim on the title of premier global leader.
Allison depicts plausible scenarios of how conflicts between these two superpowers could break out: disputes over Taiwan or the South China Sea, or an accidental provocation by a third party -- it was the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist that triggered World War I -- or, less likely, a quarrel related to economic competition.
The most dangerous threat lurks in the Korean peninsula, where North Korea has nuclear warheads and is trying to develop the missile technology to hit San Francisco. 

What happens if the Pyongyang regime collapses and its strongman, Kim Jong-un is eliminated?
In March, Xi explained the nuances of the Korean situation to Trump, whose White House had warned that "if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."
If that's a military threat, consider: An assault on North Korea would be answered by missile attacks against nearby Seoul that could kill as many as a million people. 

Imagine that followed by an invasion of the north by the U.S. and South Korea to prevent more carnage. 

Would China sit still for a unified Korean peninsula allied with the U.S.? 

The answer was no in 1950, to General Douglas MacArthur's shock, when it was much less powerful, confident and ambitious.
Allison isn't a pessimist. 

He argues that with skillful statecraft and political sensitivity these two superpowers can avoid war.
Xi is a ruthless autocrat, but a smart one with China's customary patience.
In the U.S., by contrast, the current commander-in-chief shows little interest in history and is irrational, insecure and impulsive.

World War III Casualties
	2016 Population	Killed		Survivors
CHINA	1 373 541 278	1 057 119 689	77%	316 421 589
UNITED STATES	323 995 528	19 089 783	6%	304 905 745
EUROPEAN UNION	513 949 445	371 356 958	72%	142 592 487
RUSSIA	142 355 415	30 924 816	22%	111 430 599
INDIA	1 266 883 598	1 158 499 174	91%	108 384 424
PAKISTAN	201 995 540	175 747 473	87%	26 248 067
JAPAN	126 702 133	114 241 889	90%	12 460 244
VIETNAM	95 261 021	84 340 688	89%	10 920 333
PHILIPPINES	102 624 209	92 732 902	90%	9 891 307
KOREA, NORTH	25 115 311	21 141 050	84%	3 974 261
KOREA, SOUTH	50 924 172	47 636 302	94%	3 287 870
TAIWAN	23 464 787	22 278 490	95%	1 186 297
	4 246 812 437	3 195 109 214	75%	1 051 703 223

Sina Delenda Est

Destined for war: China, America and the Thucydides trap 
By Gideon Rachman 
As Xi Jinping prepares to meet Donald Trump in Florida next week, his staff might do well to get hold of an advance copy of an important new book by Graham Allison on US-Chinese relations — which bears the doom-laden title Destined for War. 
The Chinese dictator is already familiar with the work of Allison, a professor of government at Harvard.
In November 2013, I attended a meeting with Xi in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where he told a group of western visitors: “We must all work together to avoid Thucydides’ trap.”
The phrase, a reference to the ancient Greek historian’s observations about the war between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century BC, was coined by Allison to describe the dangers of a period in which an established great power is challenged by a rising power.
Allison, the author of a classic study of the Cuban missile crisis, calculates that in 12 out of 16 such cases, the rivalry has ended in open conflict.
This time, he argues, may be no different: “China and the United States are currently on a collision course for war.”
A project that Allison and his colleagues ran at Harvard examined multiple cases “in which a major nation’s rise has disrupted the position of a dominant state”, concluding that “the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule not the exception”.
In his new book, only two of these historical examples are examined in substantial detail — the original clash between Athens and Sparta, and Anglo-German rivalry before the first world war.
Of the other 10 examples that Allison examines more briefly, some are intriguing as guides to the future, while others seem less convincing.
The closest analogy to the current situation may be Japan’s challenge to American and British dominance in the Pacific in the first half of the 20th century — a rivalry that did culminate in war. The role played by naval power in that contest, as well as the way in which economic rivalry slid into military conflict, are both reminiscent of the rise in US-Chinese tensions today.
But some of the other parallels raised by Allison seem to fit the Thucydides’s trap model less closely. It is not obvious that the cold war is best understood as a rivalry between a rising and established power.
Rather, the US and the USSR both emerged as victors from the second world war, and established rival ideological systems and zones of influence in a bipolar system.
The cold war is also one of only two rivalries examined by Allison that took place after the invention of nuclear weapons.
The fact that neither of the nuclear age power-shifts (the other is listed as the rise of a unified Germany) ended in war raises the obvious question of whether these weapons have ended Thucydides’s trap, by making it unthinkably dangerous for a rising nation to go to war with an established power.
This is a question considered by Allison but one, inevitably, to which he cannot provide a conclusive answer.
Most scholars and soldiers who have looked closely at how a US-China war might actually break out have tended to argue that, in a nuclear age, neither side is likely to go to war deliberately.
But a limited clash, perhaps in the South China Sea, could easily escalate into something more serious.
In a brief preface written after the election of Donald Trump, Allison argues: “If Hollywood were to make a movie pitting China against the United States, central casting could not find two better leading actors than Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump. Each personifies his country’s deep aspirations of national greatness.”
Interestingly, both men “identify the nation ruled by the other as the principal obstacle to their dream”.
As the journalist and academic Howard French tells it in Everything Under the Heavens, China’s leader is essentially seeking to return his country to the position it has traditionally exercised in Asia — as the dominant regional power, to which other countries must defer or pay tribute.
“For the better part of two millennia, the norm for China, from its own perspective, was a natural dominion over everything under heaven,” writes French.
In practice, this meant “a vast and familiar swath of geography that consisted of nearby Central Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia”.

A US guided-missile destroyer in the South China Sea in October 2016.

This traditional Chinese aspiration had to be shelved for almost two centuries.
From the mid-19th century, China was humbled by powerful outsiders — first Europeans and then Japanese.
After the Communist victory in 1949, the country went through a period of economic and cultural isolation and relative poverty.
By the late 1970s, when China reversed course and embraced capitalism and foreign investment, it had fallen far behind the “tiger economies” of east Asia.
In its catch-up phase, China pursued friendly relations with its capitalist neighbours — including Japan, its old wartime foe.
These Asian neighbours were important sources of expertise and foreign investment for a country that was desperate to make up for lost time. 
But French, like many observers, sees a change of mood and tone in China’s relationship with the outside world since Xi came to power in 2012.
 The primary target of Chinese muscle-flexing and ambition is not, in fact, the US — but Japan.
“As China’s self-regard has swollen, along with its newfound power, Japan has returned to the center of the Chinese gaze in the form of a bull’s-eye,” writes French.
Much Chinese resentment of Japan is focused on the Japanese invasion and occupation of the 1930s. But, as French makes clear, the roots of the resentment stretch deep into the 19th century.
In one of the most compelling sections of this fluent and interesting book, French shows the importance of Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands in 1879.
These islands retain their significance today, as they include Okinawa — the site of the largest US military base in east Asia.
The current focus of territorial disputes between Japan and China is the much smaller set of islands: the Senkakus.
But reading French’s book, one cannot but wonder whether Chinese ambitions will also eventually encompass Okinawa.
America’s close alliance with Japan means that it is inevitably deeply implicated in the rising tensions between China and Japan.
Chinese hope that the US will eventually pull back from the western Pacific and allow China an unblocked path to restoring its traditional sphere of influence.
However, they are likely to be disappointed.
As Michael Green observes in By More Than Providence, “If there is one central theme in American strategic culture as it has applied to the Far East over time, it is that the United States will not tolerate any other power establishing exclusive hegemonic control over Asia and the Pacific.”
The message could not be clearer for Xi’s China.
Green, who is now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says that the idea of writing a history of American “grand strategy” in the Asia-Pacific region, from the foundation of the republic to the present day, came to him when he was working as director for Asian affairs in George W Bush’s White House — and realised that no recent study existed.
Back in the academic world, Green set about filling this gap in the literature and he has succeeded triumphantly.
His book is likely to become the standard work on the subject.
With more than 130 pages of footnotes, By More Than Providence is a weighty tome.
But the story of America’s entanglement with Asia is dramatic — encompassing colonisation of the Philippines, Pearl Harbor, the Korean and Vietnam wars and Nixon’s “opening to China”.
As well as providing a clear narrative, Green identifies some recurring dilemmas in US grand strategy over the centuries.
These include whether to see China or Japan as the more important partner; and whether to emphasise the protection of American markets or the opening of Asian markets.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was to tilt decisively in the direction of protectionism, by withdrawing America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a giant new trade pact that had been pushed by both the Bush and the Obama administrations.
Green completed his book before Trump’s victory.
But his work strongly suggests that the US may come to regret this move towards protectionism. “When new US administrations have failed to make the expansion of trade a central pillar of their strategic approach to Asia,” he writes, “they have invariably lost ground.”
Some see Trump’s protectionism as part of a broader lurch towards isolationism.
But Green’s history suggests that America is highly unlikely to pull back from the western Pacific. One of the recurring US dilemmas that he identifies is where to define America’s “forward defensive line”.
Green notes that, in response to successive security dilemmas, America has tended to extend the area that it regards as essential to its own security, so that this now stretches all the way to the Korean peninsula and the South China Sea.
“Over the course of this history,” he writes, “Americans have learned that the Pacific Ocean does not provide sanctuary against threats emanating from the Eurasian heartland if the United States is not holding the line at the Western Pacific.”
Indeed, if anything, America’s focus on Asia is becoming more intense as China rises.
Barack Obama was the first US president to declare that Asia — not Europe or the Americas — is now the highest priority for US foreign policy.
Obama’s statement reflected the growing awareness in the US of the significance of the rise of China — and the implications of that rise for the west’s traditional domination of the world order.
The books by Green, Allison and French are just three of the most important examples among a torrent of new titles that deal with the ambitions of a rising China, and the growing tensions between Beijing and Washington.
Tom Miller’s China’s Asian Dream is particularly strong on the role that Chinese-backed infrastructure development will play in fulfilling this ambition, as it “creates a modern tribute system, with all roads literally leading to Beijing”.
By contrast, Bernard Cole’s China’s Quest for Great Power focuses on another aspect of Beijing’s development as a global player — in this case its rapid development of naval power, partly as a means to ensure that China retains access to the foreign energy supplies that are needed to fuel its economy.
Both themes have echoes of some of the conflicts examined by Allison.
The growth of Anglo-German naval rivalry was a major feature of the tensions that preceded the outbreak of the first world war.
Similarly, it was Japan’s fear of an energy blockade that helped to produce the rivalries that led to the Japanese imperial navy’s assault on Pearl Harbor.
There is, however, an important counterargument to consider.
Some scholars believe that the ambitions of modern China — outlined in different ways by French, Cole and Miller — may ultimately be thwarted because of intrinsic weaknesses within the Chinese economic and political system. 
One noted sceptic about China’s ability to make the transition to great-power status is the political scientist David Shambaugh, who argued in a 2014 book that China is likely to remain a “partial power”.
Similar scepticism is expressed by Michael Auslin, a history professor and think-tanker, whose The End of the Asian Century (reviewed more fully in the FT on February 27) is a useful corrective to unreflective optimism about the future of Asia generally and China in particular.
Auslin’s book starts with the author in one of the tunnels that North Korea has dug underneath its southern neighbour.
It is an appropriate place from which to contemplate the risks that war might yet destroy the prosperity and stability of much of modern Asia.
The differing views of China and the US on how to deal with the North Korean nuclear threat are likely to form much of the subject matter of the summit next week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The US — which has a large military presence in South Korea and which has threatened pre-emptive strikes against the North Korean nuclear programme — would inevitably be involved in any war that broke out on the peninsula.
It is likely that China, as a formal treaty ally of North Korea, would also be dragged in.
All of the books under review here were effectively completed before Trump settled into the Oval office.
Since then, the new president has sent out mixed messages about the direction of US policy in Asia. At times, the Trump administration has signalled a much more confrontational approach to China — for example over Taiwan or the South China Sea.
At other times, Trump and his cabinet members have taken a more conciliatory line.
The meeting with Xi may give a crucial indication as to whether the US and China are indeed sliding towards a much more bellicose relationship.

Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, RRP$28, 320 pages 

Everything Under The Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, by Howard French, Scribe, RRP£20/Knopf, RRP$27.95, 352 pages 

By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783, by Michael Green, Columbia University Press, RRP£38/$45, 760 pages 

China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building along the New Silk Road, by Tom Miller, Zed Books, RRP£14.99/$24.95, 304 pages 

China’s Quest for Great Power: Ships, Oil and Foreign Policy, by Bernard Cole, Naval Institute Press, RRP$34.95, 320 pages

‘Crouching Tiger’, by Peter Navarro

Beijing wants to neutralise the US in east Asia
By Richard McGregor

At the core of Peter Navarro’s book is the conceit that this is a kind of geopolitical detective story, each chapter laying out clues for readers to assess the import of China’s rapid military development. The puzzle centres on a simple question: will the US go to war with China?
In truth, this is a detective story with little mystery. 

Navarro, a business professor at University of California-Irvine and long-time critic of China, harbours no doubts that China is a revisionist power that wants to neutralise the US in east Asia and supplant it as the regional hegemon.

This is hardly a difficult case to make. 

After all, China’s behaviour is what one would expect of any great power that wants to dominate its neighbourhood. 

That it is an aggrieved power with a chip on its shoulder from historic humiliations at the hands of the west, and has a political system that makes it an ideological rival with the US, only heightens the chances of conflict with Washington.
In that respect, Crouching Tiger is an extended riff on the utility of the “Thucydides trap”, the idea that an established power and an upstart rival will almost inevitably come into armed conflict. 

China is not so much drifting into this trap, but building a one-way super highway to reach it, eyes wide open, in readiness for conflict with America. 

He lays out the scenarios with clarity but adds little to the sum of knowledge about China’s military capabilities and strategic aims.
Navarro is not entirely to blame for the limits of his insight. 

China’s communist rulers have maintained, against the odds in an information-drenched era, a secretive system hostile to notions of transparency. 

As Kurt Campbell, a former state department official under Barack Obama, says in the book: “The US is all about showing what we’ve got. Look how powerful we are. You don’t want to screw with us.” 

China, by contrast, occasionally flexes its military muscles, and often claims not to have them at all — although that is a pretence even Beijing can barely manage these days given its massive militarisation in the South China Sea.

Mostly, though, Beijing deflects attention from the build-up of its capabilities, either by attacking its critics or by refusing to acknowledge the military dimension to such activities. 

For China’s leadership, transparency is not a virtue but a weapon to be used against it.
As so often with books such as this, Crouching Tiger is as much about the US as about China. 

A grab-bag of familiar American failings, from creeping isolationism to the school system, are all cited. 

He also takes odd swipes at the “pervasive censorship” of Chinese news in western media.
Navarro’s book is part of a frustrating genre, of a call to arms against a menacing rival superpower that is invariably acting out of the worst of motives. 

The real question is what China wants in the place of the US-made postwar security system. 

At the moment, the leadership in Beijing will not say, and Navarro’s book does not come close to solving the mystery.

Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World, by Peter Navarro, Prometheus, RRP £19.99/$25

Thucydides Trap in Asia: The Sino-Indian conflict

By Abir Chattaraj

At the battle of Pylos (Seventh year of the Peloponnesian War), the Athenians won a major victory over Sparta. 

In consequence of their loss, Sparta sent envoys to Athens to offer a peace treaty. 

The Spartan envoys enjoined the Athenians to “treat their gains as precarious,” and advised that “if great enmities are ever to be really settled, we think it will be, not by the system of revenge and military success… but when the more fortunate combatant waives his privileges and, guided by gentler feelings, conquers his rival in generosity and accords peace on more moderate conditions than expected.”

Unfortunately this age old wisdom pervades the Chinese in Asia.
The Greek historian Thucydides theorised that when an established power encountered a rising power, a conflict between them was inevitable. 

Today China, Asia’s established power and India, a rising power are heading towards this very own Thucydides trap.
China today perceives India as an adversary. 

Its very actions are geared towards this objective. 

One-third of Chinese naval power is being deployed to the Indian Ocean Region. 

The Chinese are building a ring of alliances under the “String of Pearls” doctrine with countries around India’s periphery: from Myanmar to Pakistan. 

It has interposed itself in India’s land disputes in Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan; accused India of propagating the Tibetan movement, covert attacks and espionage and human rights violations; excluded India from the China-sponsored Maritime Silk Road and the Quadrilateral Dialogue with US on Afghanistan, blocked India’s NSG bid and openly supported terrorist Masood Azhar in the Security Council.
Chinese military moves to contain India has become more robust and overt in recent months.
These include: support for Pakistan’s militarization; the constant irritant stationing of Chinese naval forces in the Sri Lanka; Gwadar in Pakistan occupied Balochistan; aggressive naval patrolling in the Indian Ocean Region; ever closer defense cooperation with and supplies to Pakistan, Bangladesh; joint naval and military exercises with Pakistan, Sri-Lanka, Bangladesh; an agreement with most Indian neighbours for Billions of Dollars worth of soft loans.
The recent ex-parte award against China on the South China Sea islands dispute by The Hague Arbitration Tribunal ,could bring the growing Sino-Indian tensions to a climax. 

China vehemently opposes any assistance given to Vietnam in any form whatsoever, contests Indian drilling of offshore oil reserves by ONGC in legitimate Vietnamese waters and holds maritime naval exercises on South China to reassert its territorial claims.
The invidious actions of China are likely to result in more heartburn in Indian diplomatic circles.
Beijing’s stance towards India-Japanese co-operation is also likely to harden. 

The US-Japan-India military exercises could be countered by joint China-Russia naval operations in the North China Sea.
The escalating Sino-US rivalry will compel Pakistan to align itself even more closely with China. Consequently, Pakistan will face even greater US pressure and coercion, including on Afghanistan, terrorism, nuclear and missile issues.
The impact of a Sino-Indian confrontation would be global. 

Russia-China defense and economic cooperation would intensify which is most likely to include huge fundings for the ailing Russian oil sector. 

The One Belt, One Road project will link China with Europe through Russia, greatly hampering the choke points in the Straits of Malacca. 

Africa could divide between Western, Indian and Chinese blocs. 

In Latin America, some other states may be open to closer relations with China to counter India’s growing reputation. 

The Sino-Indian economic relationship which currently is geared vehemently favorably towards China, would decline sharply, slowing growth in both countries and the world economy and possibly igniting another global economic crisis.
Of the nearly 15 historical cases reviewed by Dr Kissinger of established powers encountering rising rivals, 10 resulted in conflict. 

Both China and India could yet back away from the Thucydides trap. 

The onus for doing so rests with Beijing. 

Unfortunately, the anti-India populism reflected in the current Chinese diplomatic moves does not augur well for the triumph of restraint and reason.