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

Clue 2: States can be embedded in larger economic, political, and security institutions that constrain historically “normal” behaviors. Germany is the poster child of an economic and political giant that remains a military dwarf. It is economically integrated with its neighbors and protected by an American security overlord with a nuclear umbrella. If a combination of economic stress, immigrants, and a revival of populist nationalism were to unravel the EU, would an increasingly powerful Germany still pose no threat to its neighbors? If the US were to weaken or even withdraw NATO’s security blanket, would we see a renationalization of the military forces of Europe, including in Germany? And if that were to occur, could Thucydidean dynamics make war between Germany and some of its neighbors again thinkable? Or, alternatively, have the cultural changes in Germany become so deeply internalized that it is no longer imaginable that Germans recover their martial traditions?