Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

by Graham Allison

In the 1960s, futurist Herman Kahn (one of the Cold War strategists parodied by Peter Sellers’s movie character Dr. Strangelove) proposed a 44-rung escalation ladder from “subcrisis maneuvering” up to full-scale nuclear war.27 Kahn’s first rung was the “ostensible crisis”—the spark. He explained that in a crisis, two powers would rarely proceed methodically and incrementally up the ladder. Background conditions and accelerants could cause them to skip rungs. As they move up the ladder, each state would assess its position relative to the adversary’s at each rung and calculate how it would compare at rungs further up the ladder. This in turn might shape a willingness to accept stalemate or defeat rather than escalate to more destructive levels of war. Often, one state has an advantage over several steps, only to be at a disadvantage higher up the ladder. While each would prefer to settle at a point where it has the upper hand, it must find terms acceptable to an adversary who knows that he has the option of escalating to more destructive levels of conflict at which he then holds the advantage.