Thucydides’ Mouse Trap

By Bill Lee

Graham Allison’s prognostications about a future war between China and the United States are like those of earthquake predictors. In his much-discussed book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Allison states that a US-China war is “more probable” than usually considered but not “inevitable.” You can’t lose with a prediction like that: “The chances are that a big earthquake will happen soon but it may be delayed for another 100, 10,000, or 1,000,000 years”; in other words, well after the predictor is dead. In the case of earthquake predictors, they may use a time scale of 300 years to develop their probabilities; Allison uses a time scale of 500 years and examines 16 historical cases, 12 of which prove his thesis.

The original Thucydides’ Trap of course happened when the rising Athens frightened Sparta into thinking they were threatened, which led them to start the Peloponnesian War. The theory holds that a rising power will often come into conflict with a dominant, established one.

Xi Jinping has already said there is no such thing as a Thucydides’ Trap. And according to Prof. Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania, the two greatest American classicists of the 20^th century, Prof. Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Prof. Ernst Badian of Harvard, showed that the idea of a Thucydides’ Trap does not actually exist in Thucydides’ text on the Peloponnesian War. What argues best against China falling into the Thucydides’ Trap and provoking war with America is the scourge that Thucydides himself could never have imagined: nuclear weapons.

Allison concludes that America can respond in four ways to the rising China: accommodate it, undermine it, make a long-term (30 years) treaty with the PRC, or define a new relationship with the Chinese. A new relationship means working with China to deal with other global problems like terrorism and, most importantly, climate change.

But why even suggest China is idiotic enough to start an Armageddonic war with America? To jump on the anti-China bandwagon and sell books? To have a complete misreading of China’s intentions? I suspect the latter. One thing that is very striking about Allison’s book is the references. He constantly refers to pronouncements by Henry Kissinger, certainly a major figure in US diplomacy towards China but not, despite a slim book on Chinese history, a true China scholar. Lee Kuan Yew gets quoted several times, but, incredibly, so does Whitaker Chambers (of Alger Hiss fame) for his views on Communism. In other words, Allison is clearly not an expert on China. In fact, reading over the long list of names in the Acknowledgement section of the book, I could not find one Chinese name. A strange omission for a book dealing with a very serious issue about China.

Leave a comment

Photo by quiggyt4 via Flickr