China DebatesChina Debates.docVIP

China Debates: Is War with U.S. Inevitable? China wonders if it can avoid the Thucydides Trap. Lyle J. Goldstein March 3, 2015 Tweet inShare8 It has become quite common to use historical analogies to describe the complex Sino-American relationship. At the centenary of the First World War, the comparison between China’s rise and that of Wilhelmine Germany has been widely made. However, a path-breaking 2012 opinion piece by Harvard University’s Graham Allison reached back to Ancient Greece to describe the strategic dilemmas facing the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century. Pointing to what is perhaps the most important sentence in the entire Western cannon on international relations, Allison invited strategists and analysts on both sides of the Pacific to recall that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Moreover, Allison supplied disturbing evidence of the frequency of war between a rising and established power, as observed by Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War. According to Allison, “in 11 of 15 cases since 1500 where a rising power emerged to challenge a ruling power, war occurred.” While Allison’s reference to the Peloponnesian War seems to have had some impact on the relevant debates in Washington, there has been little exploration of the idea’s impact in Beijing. Yet, the “Thucydides Trap” concept has indeed been discussed by China’s top foreign policy decision-makers. In order to better understand Chinese perspectives related to “Thucydides Trap,” this edition of the Dragon Eye series will explore a forum dedicated to that theme in the official Chinese military journal 军事历史 [Military History] that was published by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Military Sciences (AMS) in 2014. (Recommended:?Revealed: Why China Would Lose a War against America) The journal’s first reflection on Thucydides, which was critical, was by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Senior Co