United States, China and Thucydides’s Trap

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the economic and political collapse of the Soviet communist regime, that world, mediated by the Soviet-American rivalry, became unipolar and the United States was left to play alone, as a triumphant and dominant power.

Fukuyama wrote ‘The End of History’ in view of the loss of validity of any debate about the competing models until then. From then on and until our days, the world has experienced a stage of relative peace, economic growth and political stability. However, no one was standing still. Every piece, every actor on that global chessboard that is geopolitics has been moving according to its interests and threats. The conventional war was transformed into terrorism, as technified as cruel. Europe, whose hegemony ended with the Second World War, looks pale on the periphery. A new scenario is evident. The correlation of forces has changed. The gravitational center of world power moves ineluctably from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific. The Americans feel a vigorous and powerful breath blowing on the back of their necks, coming from China.

In Chevy Chase, near the Van Ness-UDC station of the red line of the Metro, is the famous coffee-bookstore ‘Politics and Prose’, equivalent to ‘La Casa del Libro’ in Madrid. Located at 5015 Connecticut Avenue, is a place frequented by the cream of Washington’s intelligentsia. An orderly line of readers waited to buy and sign the fashionable book: ‘Destined for War’ written by Graham Allison, political analyst, advisor to the American government and professor at Harvard. On the cover is a call text: Can the United States and China escape the Thucydides Trap? and the famous diplomat Henry Kissinger adds: “The Thucydides Trap identifies a cardinal challenge in the world order.

Thucydides, an Athenian soldier and chronicler of his time, is considered the father of history as a scientific discipline. He described the Peloponnesian War in a memorable book. Athens and Sparta confronted each other 2,500 years ago and in this respect he drops the following comment: “What made the war inevitable was the rise of Athens’ power and the fear that this phenomenon caused in Sparta”.

In Professor Allison’s book, the central element is China, its meteoric and multidimensional growth never before seen in history and how it is impacting and creating confusion in the international order and particularly in the United States, which has been the main architect and guardian of that order. The idea of the emergence of another power so great and strong, or even greater, can be interpreted as an assault or surprise that threatens to displace the current dominant power. The book walks through the last 500 years and identifies 16 cases in which an emerging power threatens to displace another established power. Twelve of those cases ended in war. Only four times did peace triumph. By the way, the first of these four cases that did not end in war, was the resolution of the rivalry between Portugal (threat) and Spain (established power), with the intervention of Pope Alexander VI, his ‘Alexandrian bulls’ and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

Let’s measure the impact of China’s growth. In 1978, its population was one billion and 90% of them lived below the extreme poverty line (income less than 2 dollars a day). Today, 40 years later, less than 1% live in that condition – in just 40 years! 25 years ago, China did not appear in the Major Leagues of the most powerful countries. Today it is in the forefront and in some areas has already surpassed the United States. China is the main trading partner of most Asian countries. It is the power with the largest presence in Africa. In Latin America, China’s footprint is overwhelming and, as a result of Trump’s pretentious diplomatic onanism and his eunuch multilateralism, Europe is beginning to come closer in search of refuge under the yellow shadow.
 

The unstoppable growth of one. The reaction of the other. Seasoned with elements such as exacerbated patriotism, arrogance and paranoia, they make up a toxic cocktail that could lead those actors to the greatest collision in history and give fulfillment, once again, to the ‘Thucydides Trap’, an expression coined by Professor Allison and defined as the dangerous dynamic that occurs when an emerging power threatens to displace another established power, as Sparta threatened to displace Athens; Germany to Great Britain and, today, China to the United States.

In light of the facts, the most competent and ambitious leader on the international scene today is Chinese President Xi Jinping and there are no secrets as to what he wants. When he became head of state six years ago he said so, specifying goals and deadlines: “In 2025, China must dominate the market of the 10 largest technology companies in the world, electric automotive market, robots, artificial intelligence and computers; in 2035, be a leader in all areas of innovation, technological advancement and space exploration; in 2049, to celebrate 100 years of the creation of the People’s Republic of China, be, without doubt, the number one country in the world, including an armed forces that he called combat and triumph,” it is worth saying, clear and evident military superiority.  China is doing very well in the fulfillment of these objectives.  Václav Havel described it as follows: “Everything has happened so fast, that we have not had time even to be surprised”.

The recent election of Joe Biden is a halo of hope, for the world today requires its leaders to have imagination, creativity, common sense and courage to find ways to manage this and any other rivalry and avoid a war that no one wants and whose catastrophic consequences we all know. The failure of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ scenario also depends on being informed of the story.

Jorge Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, left us these wise words: “Only those who refuse to study and know history are condemned to repeat it".

Jesus A. Garcia-Rojas. International Policy Analyst