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    Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
    Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
    Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
    Audiobook12 hours

    Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

    Written by Graham Allison

    Narrated by Richard Ferrone

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    About this audiobook

    War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" sixteen times. In twelve of the sixteen-from war between the French and the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century to the two world wars of the twentieth-the results have been catastrophic. Today, the same structural forces propel China and the United States toward a cataclysm of unseen proportions, even as both sides insist that such a war could never occur. In Destined for War, Allison compares the U.S.-China conflict to its closest parallel: World War I. There, a rising Germany threatened the supremacy of the British Empire. He sketches several scenarios in which America and China might slide, against their intent and better judgment, into a similar conflict. But he also examines the rare instances when two clashing powers have avoided disaster. Can our current standoff be one of those exceptions? Allison's answer is essential reading for our age and those to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 30, 2017
    ISBN9781501955686
    Author

    Graham Allison

    GRAHAM ALLISON is director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the best-selling author of LeeKuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World; Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe; and Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Allison has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense and advised the secretaries of defense under every president from Reagan to Obama. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Destined for War

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    • 3/5
      The main strength of this book is that it reminded the world of Thucydides Trap and made many commentators pause to think how a rising power and a possible declining one could interact. While past examples are explained to show how war can come to pass in such an environment and also how they can be avoided, I think this was an essay topic expanded into a book. The points may have been better made if they were more brief.
    • 4/5
      Graham Allison’s book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap?, discusses China's rise into the US political mainstream. After explaining the Thucydides Trap – the friction created when a rising power challenges an established power, the author presents twelve historical examples that resulted in war, and four in which war was avoided. Allison proceeds to focus on the examples he considers to be the most instructive, namely the Peloponnesian War, World War I, and the Cold War.Allison also relays insights from the late Lee Kuan Yew in making his case that Beijing's goal is the restoration of China as a regional hegemon. He argues against the idea that China will become a 'responsible stakeholder' in the international system in which the US remains the arbiter. China seeks the expulsion of the US from Asia, and is rapidly accumulating capabilities to achieve this goal.He translates an unfiltered Chinese view for his local audience, analogising it to America's expansion in the Western Hemisphere under President Teddy Roosevelt. Going by Allison's ledger, the factors favouring war between the US and China are ominous: two powers with narratives of their own 'exceptionalism', China's sense of past humiliation and present restoration, incompatible cultures and political systems, and a series of entangling flashpoints and alliances. On the positive side, Allison argues, is an interdependent trade relationship and stable nuclear deterrence. Allison also labels North Korea as a 'Cuban missile crisis in slow motion'. Ironically, the weakness of Allison's book is not his warning that the US and China are at risk of falling into the Thucydides Trap – a case he makes conclusively – but rather his explanations for why war remains avoidable. First, Allison makes the common error that nuclear dynamics between the US and China work the same way as it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Nuclear deterrence rests not just on capability (ensuring a retaliatory strike), but also credibility. During the Cold War, the fall of Western Europe to the Soviet Union posed such an existential threat to the US that a nuclear war could credibly be initiated to prevent it. In Asia, however, the US will not commence a full nuclear exchange with China and there is no way to convince Beijing otherwise. As such, current nuclear dynamics in Asia makes major war more likely, as mapped out in my review of the RAND study of a US-China war, a study also cited by Allison.Finally, while carefully articulating China’s perception of the rivalry, it is surprising just how US-centric Allison’s ideas are for how conflict might be avoided. Allison suggests curtailing America’s commitment to Taiwan in exchange for concessions in the South and East China seas, or abandoning Prompt Global Strike in exchange for Beijing limiting its conventional expansion. However it seems unlikely China will agree to any of this. Why should it? Time is on Beijing's side. These kinds of deals only worked during the Cold War because each side recognised the other’s core interests while the balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union remained relatively stable. In the case of China and the US, the power shift is rapid and profound, and while Allison clearly understands this he fails to see the implications of his own conclusions. Rather than horse-trading over Taiwan and the South China Sea, Beijing might suggest the US leave Asia entirely in exchange for permanent recognition of Washington’s annexation of Hawaii!Despite these shortcomings, this reader found Allison’s book good reading both for the overview that it provides. In Destined for War, Allison calls Obama’s Asia pivot 'using an extra strength aspirin to treat cancer'. This author suggests stronger methods.
    • 4/5
      An excellent overview of what happens when one state declines and another rises. It's books like these that made me wish I would have stuck with Political Science in college.