Harvard University professor Graham Allison reached far back into history with his 2017 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, using an example from the fifth century BC, when there were no nuclear weapons, smartphones, or satellites in space. It was the time of city-states when the expansion and growth of power in Athens alarmed Sparta, 130 miles to the southwest, to such an extent that it led to war. In all, Allison studied sixteen similar cases over a five-hundred-year period and found that twelve had ended in bloodshed. To avoid war, he concludes, there
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