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October 19 - November 24, 2019
“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Intentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception. It happened between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE, between Germany and Britain a century ago, and almost led to war between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today it has set the world’s two biggest powers on a path to a cataclysm nobody wants, but which they may prove unable to avoid.
If the US were a corporation, it would have accounted for 50 percent of the global economic market in the years immediately after World War II. By 1980, that had declined to 22 percent. Three decades of double-digit Chinese growth has reduced that US share to 16 percent today. If current trends continue, the US share of global economic output will decline further over the next three decades to just 11 percent. Over this same period, China’s share of the global economy will have soared from 2 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2016, well on its way to 30 percent in 2040.
Over the past five hundred years, in sixteen cases a major rising power has threatened to displace a ruling power. In twelve of those, the result was war. The four cases that avoided this outcome did so only because of huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part of challenger and challenged alike.
As George Santayana noted, only those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it.
What does President Xi Jinping’s China want? In one line: to make China great again. The deepest aspiration of over a billion Chinese citizens is to make their nation not only rich, but also powerful. Indeed, their goal is a China so rich and so powerful that other nations will have no choice but to recognize its interests and give it the respect that it deserves.
asked what he had learned about “deep sleepers”: individuals with whom the Agency had established a relationship, but whose assignment essentially consisted of going to live and prosper in a foreign country so as to develop a full understanding of its culture, people, and government. With a commitment to be helpful to their careers in unseen ways, the Agency only asked of these individuals that, when called upon — unobtrusively, perhaps just once or twice in a decade — they would provide their candid insights into what was happening in the country, and what was likely to happen in the future.
8 In President Obama’s words, “After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the US is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region.”9 He promised to increase America’s diplomatic, economic, and military presence in the Asia-Pacific, and signaled the US determination to counter the impact of China’s rise in the region.
The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia,
Perhaps most devastatingly for America’s self-conception, in 2016 — as it has since the 2008 worldwide financial crisis — China continued to serve as the primary engine of global economic growth.15
For all the noise about the Chinese economic slowdown, remember one incandescent fact: since the Great Recession, 40 percent of all the growth around the world has occurred in just one country: China.25
By 2005, the country was building the square-foot equivalent of today’s Rome every two weeks.29 Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement than the US did in the entire twentieth century.30 In 2011, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days.31 Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years.
China is now the world leader in producing computers, semiconductors, and communications equipment, as well as pharmaceuticals.54 In 2015, Chinese filed almost twice as many total patent applications as the second-place Americans and became the first country to generate more than one million applications in a single year.55 On its current path, China will surpass the US to become the world leader in research-and-development spending by 2019.56
In response to these trends, many Americans have sought refuge in the belief that for all its size and bluster, China’s success is still essentially a story of imitation and mass production. This view has some grounding in reality: theft of intellectual property — both in the old-fashioned way, with spies, and increasingly by exploiting cyber methods as well — has been another key part of China’s economic development program. As a Chinese colleague once explained to me, what Americans call R&D (research and development), Chinese think of as RD&T, where the T stands for theft. Of course, China
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China primarily conducts foreign policy through economics because, to put it bluntly, it can. It is currently the largest trading partner for over 130 countries — including all the major Asian economies. Its trade with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations accounted for 15 percent of ASEAN’s total trade in 2015, while the US accounted for only 9 percent.
Better than bilateral bargaining, of course, are international institutions that give the designer the advantage. The United States led the way down this road in the aftermath of World War II when creating the Bretton Woods institutions: the IMF (to coordinate international finance), the World Bank (to provide below-market-rate loans to developing countries), and the GATT and its successor, the World Trade Organization (to promote trade). In both the IMF and the World Bank, one — and only one — country has a veto over any changes in governance of the institutions: the United States.
“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
Beneath these contributing factors lies a more fundamental cause, and he focuses his spotlight on it. What made war “inevitable,” Thucydides tells us, “was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta.”3 This is the phenomenon that I have labeled Thucydides’s Trap: the severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to upend a ruling one.
promontory
And after centuries of rule by strongmen, Athens had also begun a bold, new political experiment in what it called democracy. Its Assembly and the Council of Five Hundred were open to all free men and made all key decisions.
Oracle at Delphi.
When states repeatedly fail to act in what appears to be their true national interest, it is often because their policies reflect necessary compromises among parties within their government rather than a single coherent vision.
“You know as well as we do that right is a question that only has meaning in relations between equals in power. In the real world, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
Thucydides identifies three primary drivers fueling this dynamic that lead to war: interests, fear, and honor.
Thus Thucydides’s Trap claimed its first victims. In spite of great statesmen and wise voices in both Athens and Sparta warning that war would mean disaster, the shifting balance of power led both sides to conclude that violence was the least bad option available. And the war came.
Readers who wonder whether a trade conflict could escalate into nuclear war should pay careful attention to the curious path that led Japan and the United States to Pearl Harbor.
The first highlights a rising state’s enhanced sense of itself, its interests, and its entitlement to recognition and respect. The second is essentially the mirror image of the first, the established power exhibiting an enlarged sense of fear and insecurity as it faces intimations of “decline.”
According to the Two-Power Standard, announced in 1889, Britain declared that it would maintain a fleet of battleships equal to the numbers deployed by its next two competitors combined.
In the thousand days between his memorandum and the outbreak of World War I, Churchill led a Herculean effort to maintain British naval supremacy, simultaneously making bold diplomatic strokes to broker détente with Germany and seizing every advantage should war come.
Churchill knew that on British warships “floated the might, majesty, dominion, and power of the British Empire.” If its navy were destroyed, he wrote later, the empire “would dissolve like a dream.” All of Europe would pass “into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant.” To avoid that catastrophe, he insisted, the Royal Navy was “all we had.”4 Britain thus faced an
Churchill later put it, “For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent.”
By 1900, it encompassed modern-day India, Pakistan, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, along with much of the African continent.14 It exerted a strong influence, sometimes equivalent to de facto control, over Latin America, the Persian Gulf, and Egypt. By “ruling the waves” with a peerless navy, Britain really did rule an “empire on which the sun never set.”
Britain eventually won the war, but at immense cost, shaking its imperial reputation. The German general staff studied the Boer War carefully, concluding, as Paul Kennedy puts it, that “Britain would find it impossible to defend India against a Russian assault,” and “without a total reorganization of its military system, the empire itself would be dissolved within two decades.”
In a speech at the launch of a battleship that same year, the kaiser was equally unsubtle: “Old empires pass away and new ones are in the process of being formed.”54 The Germans seeking World Power status were ultimately, as Michael Howard has written, “not concerned with expanding within what they saw as a British dominated world-system. It was precisely that system which they found intolerable, and which they were determined to challenge on a basis of equality.”55
As late as 1910, he told former president Theodore Roosevelt, visiting Berlin on a European tour, that war between Germany and Britain was “unthinkable”: “I was brought up in England . . . I feel myself partly an Englishman,” he said with passion. And then, “with intense emphasis,” he told Roosevelt: “I ADORE ENGLAND!”
A navy that rivaled Britain’s would not only enable Germany to achieve its destiny as a World Power, but also end its intolerable position of vulnerability to coercion by a superior British fleet.
As the kaiser pronounced in the toast to his uncle, “As a little boy, I was allowed to visit Portsmouth and Plymouth . . . I admired the proud English ships in those two splendid harbors. Then there awoke in me the wish to build ships like these someday, and when I was grown up to possess as fine a navy as the English.”
The Entente Cordiale did not commit Britain to France’s defense, but in 1905–6 London and Paris began secret military talks. In 1907, Britain signed a convention with Russia, putting their colonial disputes on ice, and thereby creating a trilateral alignment between Britain and the Franco-Russian alliance that became known as the Triple Entente.
In 1906, he wrote to King Edward: “Our only probable enemy is Germany. Germany keeps her whole Fleet always concentrated within a few hours of England. We must therefore keep a Fleet twice as powerful concentrated within a few hours of Germany.”
Fisher noted with an eagle eye the milestones on the path to conflict.98 In 1911, he predicted that war with Germany would come when the widening of the Kiel Canal was finished. Indeed, he foresaw a German surprise attack, probably on a three-day holiday weekend. His predicted date for the “Battle of Armageddon”? October 21, 1914. (In fact, the Great War began two months earlier — in August 1914, on a holiday weekend, a month after the canal had been completed.)
Staggered by his government’s lack of readiness during the 1911 crisis when appointed several months thereafter as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill turned his attention to Britain’s vulnerabilities. His “mind was full of the dangers of war” and his heart utterly committed to making Britain, in the late Martin Gilbert’s words, “invulnerable at sea . . . Every deficiency would have to be made good, every gap filled, every contingency anticipated.”
Thus, when in 1914 Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, war seemed preferable to the prospect of Germany achieving dominance on the Continent and then threatening Britain’s survival.
On June 28, the nephew to Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph and next in line to the throne was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Bosnia. In the confrontation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that followed, Russia backed Serbia. In July, Berlin gave its infamous “blank check” to Vienna — assuring Austria-Hungary that it would receive, as the kaiser put it, “Germany’s full support” in its retaliation against Serbia, even if this caused “serious European complications.”
In what is now known as the July Crisis, the simultaneous Thucydidean dynamics between London and Berlin, and between Berlin and Moscow, became interlocked. Germany’s determination to prop up its ally and forestall the menace of a rising Russia led to its declaration of war against the tsar — and his ally, France. The German general staff’s war plan for a quick defeat of France called for invasions of Luxembourg and Belgium. But by invading Belgium on the way to crushing France, Germany crossed a red line for Britain.
Until being told on July 25 of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, Churchill’s and the cabinet’s attention was mainly on the threat of civil strife in Ireland.128 Less than two weeks later, Europe was at war.
Never before or since has a president so fundamentally shaped the country’s sense of its role in the world. TR led the nation to a new understanding of what it meant to be an American. National greatness, he insisted, rested on two imperatives: the mission to advance civilization at home and abroad, and the muscle to achieve it — in particular a superior military composed of men who embodied strength, courage, and the will to fight.
It also convinced him that those unable or unwilling to fight for themselves would perforce be ruled by others who were. “All the great masterful races have been fighting races,” he declared in his first public speech as assistant secretary. “The minute that a race loses the hard-fighting virtues,” he warned, “then, no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best. Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is an unpardonable sin.”
Winning of the West
As Roosevelt put it after the Hawaiian coup: “I believe in more ships; I believe in ultimately driving every European power off of this continent, and I don’t want to see our flag hauled down where it has been hauled up.”9
