![]() Rather, they become brash and aggressive. Over the past 150 years, peaking powers-great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown-usually don’t fade away quietly. Great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown usually don’t fade away quietly. We see the same thing in more recent cases as well. Historian Donald Kagan showed, for instance, that Athens started acting more belligerently in the years before the Peloponnesian War because it feared adverse shifts in the balance of naval power-in other words, because it was on the verge of losing influence vis-à-vis Sparta. The most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.Īs we show in our forthcoming book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, this scenario is more common than you might think. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. ![]() The future starts to look quite forbidding a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical horizons. Such a country should follow the dictum former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping laid down for a rising China after the Cold War: It should hide its capabilities and bide its time. But if its position is steadily improving, it should postpone a deadly showdown with the reigning hegemon until it has become even stronger. All things equal, it will seek greater global influence and prestige. A country whose relative wealth and power are growing will surely become more assertive and ambitious. Rising powers do expand their influence in ways that threaten reigning powers.īut the calculus that produces war-particularly the calculus that pushes revisionist powers, countries seeking to shake up the existing system, to lash out violently-is more complex. Washington and Beijing would not be locked in rivalry if China was still poor and weak. In the runup to the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century B.C., Athens would not have seemed so menacing to Sparta had it not built a vast empire and become a naval superpower. The rise of new powers is invariably destabilizing. This is the body of work underpinning the Thucydides Trap, and there is, admittedly, an elemental truth to the idea. There is an entire swath of literature, known as “power transition theory,” which holds that great-power war typically occurs at the intersection of one hegemon’s rise and another’s decline. It’s best thought of instead as a “peaking power trap.” And if history is any guide, it’s China’s-not the United States’-impending decline that could cause it to snap shut. But it’s not the product of a power transition the Thucydidean cliché says it is. There’s indeed a deadly trap that could ensnare the United States and China. And it doesn’t explain why war is a very real possibility in U.S.-China relations today because it fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development-the point at which its relative power is peaking and will soon start to fade. It doesn’t capture the dynamics that have often driven revisionist powers-whether that is Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941-to start some of history’s most devastating conflicts. The Thucydides Trap doesn’t really explain what caused the Peloponnesian War. The only problem with this familiar formula is that it’s wrong. As tensions between the United States and China escalate, the belief that the fundamental cause of friction is a looming “power transition”-the replacement of one hegemon by another-has become canonical. ![]() Even Chinese President Xi Jinping has endorsed the concept arguing Washington must make room for Beijing. The idea of a Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, holds that the danger of war will skyrocket as a surging China overtakes a sagging America. “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable,” the ancient historian Thucydides wrote-a truism now invoked, ad nauseum, in explaining the U.S.-China rivalry. The outcome is a spiral of fear and hostility leading, almost inevitably, to conflict. Tensions multiply tests of strength ensue. An ascendant power, which chafes at the rules of the existing order, gains ground on an established power-the country that made those rules. Why do great powers fight great wars? The conventional answer is a story of rising challengers and declining hegemons.
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