“War between the United States and China is inconceivable for our limited cognition but independent reality does not fatalistically preclude it. A diplomatic “doomsday machine” that led to the path dependent trajectory of WWI can possibly occur in Sino-U.S. relations and push the world into a singular catastrophe. Statesmanship is the soundest antidote.”
—— Graham Allison, Tsinghua University, March 2015.
This week at Tsinghua University, professor Graham Allison delivered a distinguished lecture on the topic “Can the U.S. and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap?” The lecture attracted more than a 100 participants, among them leading Tsinghua professors, doctoral researchers, and journalists from leading Chinese media.
Allison is not simply a professor of Harvard University; he is an eminent U.S. strategic intellectual and former assistant secretary of defense as well as one of the foremost authors in strategic interaction whose book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis has long been a classic in the IR discipline. At Tsinghua, Allison warned that simply because a U.S. China war seems inconceivable due to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), it does not mean it cannot happen. Inconceivability is about the mind and our cognitive perceptions about the possible. Reality is outside of our mind and events can run against our limited human cognition. History has repeatedly confirmed human cognitive limitations about predicting the future and evading catastrophe, that later generations see a posteriori as trivially preventable.
In the decade before WWI, Norman Angel’s book, The Great Illusion, argued the fatalism of perpetual peace due to economic interdependence, and had been a best seller in Europe. Nine months before the end of WWI, Andrew Carnegie sent a utopian card to leaders around the world expressing his wishes for the New Year. “I am greeting you 1914, the year that peace will break out perpetually,” Carnegie wrote delightfully. Carnegie strongly believed that states would from now on would resolve their differences at the International Court of Arbitration that he had personally founded in the Hague. Similarly the authors of the Athens-Sparta peace treaty believed in the 5th century BCE that the binding arbitration clause in the agreement would adequately promote peace. Both aspirations proved equally utopic and shortsighted. In both cases war broke out and catastrophe reached unprecedented proportions.
Today the competition between China and the United States is as perplexing as in most cases when a rising power faced a ruling power, Allison argued. He warned that both China and the United States would comprehensively compete for supremacy in the Intestate System. America sees itself as the “city on the hill,” the indispensable, exceptional empire that is endorsed by nature, the constitution and God to lead the world into the supreme Good: the American dream of liberal democracy.
China is equally daring and visionary. For 2000 years the Middle Kingdom has ensured a Pax Sinica and it has shaped the culture, economy and political philosophy of Asia. Citing Lee Kuan Yew’s book that he personally edited, Allison attested that China is bound to fight not for shared leadership but for exclusive supremacy over the United States and create a Chinese century. The two behemoths are thus marching into Thucydides trap and both sides must present some extraordinary statesmanship to neutralize the course of events that can lead to the end of human civilization, Allison concluded.
The question of Thucydides trap has become a classic in Sino-US relations and many distinguished authors have time after time provided sharp intellectual commentaries on Thucydides’ enduring relevance (ktema es aei) for the current rising securitization between the United States and China. Some focused on the overarching structural analysis between a rising power China and a status quo power the United States, while others (including the author) focused on Thucydedian case studies and historical analogies relevant for the present China-U.S. relationship.
An interesting case study that has not received adequate attention is the importance of technology, and in particular defensive technology, in alienating competitors and facilitating the rise of a rising power against the status quo hegemon.
When Athens and Sparta defeated the invading mega-force of the Persian Empire in 549 BCE, peace was restored into the Hellenic system of city-states. Sparta was the de facto hegemon of Hellas and Athens was a rising power whose nautical and commercial capabilities soon alienated the Spartans. Thucydides reports an interesting story on the beginning of the Spartan – Athens competition for supremacy that is relevant to the current events in the Asian Pacific.
The Athenians under the strategic intelligence of Themistocles – a leading general whose brinkmanship contributed singularly to the defeat of the Persian Empire – decided to build the long walls connecting the city of Athens to its most important port Piraeus. Such a project essentially turned Athens – a continental city – into an impenetrable island. It made it impossible for the land forces of the Lacedaemon to attack and utterly defeat the Athenian army. After the walls had been completed, the Athenians sought security in their walled city and used their invincible triremes to secure trade and import the necessities of everyday life. Secured from the threat of Spartan army, the Atheneans could continue expanding their empire in perpetuity.
When the Spartans learned about the Athenian long walls, they immediately dispatched envoys and asked for construction to cease. Of course as Thucydides persuasively reports, the Spartans covered their true intentions by citing their worries of a Persian return in Athens. The Persians, the Spartans supported, could utilize the Athenian fortifications as a permanent Persian bastion against the Greeks. The Athenians however were not persuaded by Spartan justifications. They instead remained resolute to complete the task and secure their city. Immediately Themistocles himself visited Sparta to win time, and support the Athenian case as he enjoyed respect among the allies due to his great contribution to the Persian defeat. Thucydides describes the series of events in eloquence and should thus be cited in full:
“The Lacedaemonians knew what would happen [building the walls] and sent an embassy to Athens. They would rather themselves have seen neither the Athenians nor any one else protected by a wall; but their main motive was the importunity of their allies, who dreaded not only the Athenian navy, which had until lately been quite small, but also the spirit which had animated them in the Persian War. So the Lacedaemonians requested them not to restore their walls(…) They did not reveal their real wishes or the suspicion which they entertained of the Athenians, but argued that the Barbarian, if he again attacked them, would then have no strong place which he could make his head-quarters as he had lately made Thebes(…)To this the Athenians, by the advice of Themistocles, replied, that they would send an embassy of their own to discuss the matter, and so got rid of the Spartan envoys. He then proposed that he should himself start at once for Sparta, and that they should give him colleagues who were not to go immediately, but were to wait until the wall reached the lowest height which could possibly be defended (…)Having given these instructions and intimated that he would manage affairs at Sparta, he departed.”
Themistocles in Sparta won time. When it was reported to him that the long wall was of defensible status he announced it as a fait accompli to the Spartans who did not react but were secretly embittered with Athens.
The long walls immediately turned the balance of power and gave Athens the basic security needed to expand its empire without the threat of a Spartan land attack that it could not deter before. To use international relations jargon, it gave power to the defensive and thus turned the Spartan- Athenian competition into a long struggle of attrition rather than annihilation.
Today the United States and China seem to face a comparable systemic analogy. For the past 5 years the Chinese have attempted to develop state-of-the-art A2AD capabilities that basically secure China’s periphery from U.S. military offensive/ counteroffensive. Such ability – in a sense a Chinese long wall that makes continental Chine impenetrable to U.S. conventional strikes, would ensure that China turns into a regional hegemon and thus can pursue global aspirations without worrying about its fundamental security and the survivability of the CPC.
U.S. pentagon strategists have been so puzzled by Chinese rising A2AD defensive capabilities that they have come up with a new military dogma, the Air-sea battle concept, to attempt to break China’s defensive shield and obliterate Chinese assets deep into continental Chinese territory. Last week a senior U.S. official, Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments called for a maritime/ archipelagic version of NATO that will fully neutralize the Chinese A2AD strategy and ensure U.S. conventional offensive advantage over China. As it has been evident in almost every single Presidential national security report since 1990s, deterring a regional hegemon has been a core U.S. national interest that Washington is determined to protect.
These events and the enormous effort by China and the U.S.; the latter to build a modern long wall of A2AD and the former to demolish it confirm for once more Thucydides’ contemporary relevance.
Thucydides bold declaration that his work was not written to capture the applause of the moment but as a work relevant for eternity cannot be more triumphantly attested by the Tsinghua event where leading U.S. and Chinese strategic intellectual passionately discussed the history of the Peloponnesian war. Even the Chinese president Xi Jinping himself had cited Thucydides in his theorizing about a new model of great power relations in 2013.
As IR theorists have a normative categorical imperative to ensure that peace will prevail and that conflict will be a rare aberration they should not fail to face the current critical reality in Sino-US relations. Technology and the power of offence over defense will be at the center of the U.S.-China securitization in the Asia Pacific, while innovation over disruptive technologies will shape long term China-U.S. competition. To neutralize the Thucydides’ trap we must seek entrepreneurial statesmanship that makes war obsolete. We must share the fruits of technology and turn technology from “weaponry into livingry.” We must utilize the creative forces of humans towards the Epicurian or the Confucian Good life and not towards supremacy. That could be the ultimate new model of great power relations.
