If The "Thucydides Trap" Is Real, Is A U.S. - China War Inevitable?

David Ignatius, RCW/Washington Post: Is War Between a Rising China and a Dominant America Inevitable?

WASHINGTON -- Let's imagine a Chinese "applied history" project, similar to the one at Harvard's Belfer Center that helped spawn Professor Graham Allison's widely discussed book "Destined for War."

Allison's historical analysis led him to posit a "Thucydides Trap" and the danger (if not inevitability) of war between a rising China and a dominant America, like the ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian Thucydides. A study by the Belfer Center's Applied History Project identified 16 similar "rising versus ruling" cases over the past 500 years, 12 of which resulted in war. What would the Chinese say about the lessons of past interactions with the West?

Chinese analysts, from President Xi Jinping on down, have nominally rejected Allison's pessimistic analysis. "There is no Thucydides Trap," Xi has argued, claiming that he had devised an alternative "new type of great-power relations" that would avoid war by recognizing that each Asian giant had its own legitimate interests. More recently, he has shifted to arguing that "China and the U.S. must do everything possible to avoid [the] Thucydides Trap."

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Update #1: Why the White House Is Reading Greek History: The Trump team is obsessing over Thucydides, the ancient historian who wrote a seminal tract on war. (Michael Crowley, Politico).
Update #2: The White House, Wonder Woman and What to Know About Thucydides (Olivia B. Waxman, Time)
Update #3: Can an Ancient Greek Win America's Wars? A Q&A with Fred and Kimberly Kagan on the hottest book in the Trump inner circle: Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War." (Tobin Harshaw, Bloomberg)

WNU Editor: The link to Harvard's Thucydides Project is here .... Thucydides's Trap (Belfer Center). If you want to download a free ebook copy of Thucydides' book " The History Of The Poloponnesian War", you can go here and click on the bottom "Download Free PDF".