Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap?

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap?
The students will have to participate in the discussion “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap?” and answer the particular question, “Why I think that Realists are right or wrong in explaining the rise of China as a threat to peace?”

Realists argue that “historically, all kinds of states have gone to war. Whether they were democratic or authoritarian, they have all fought wars, and the great powers especially—wars we all know, like French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, wars like World War I and World War II, wars “to end all wars” but that in fact never ended a conventional war.

Almost all students in the previous classes to the question, “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” have answered that humanity will never rid itself of war. The majority of the students believe that war is a necessary evil for society. However, some students concerned about humankind’s survival claimed that there is a necessity to avoid disastrous war. This war is only possible between the major nuclear powers. If so, let us deliberate about the possibility of this war from a realist perspective.

Graham Allison, Harvard’s Professor, continues this reasoning and in the book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides’s Trap?“ argues that  (Links to an external site.)”China and the United States are currently on a collision course for war unless both parties take difficult and painful actions to avert it. And the war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognized. Indeed, on the historical record, war is more likely than not.” When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the most likely outcome is war. Twelve of 16 cases in which this occurred in the past 500 years ended violently.
Evan Osnos, The New Yorker staff writer, explains the shift (Links to an external site.) in China’s policy. For decades, China avoided directly challenging America’s primacy in the global order, instead of pursuing a strategy that Deng, in 1990, called “hide your strength and bide your time.” In his speech to the Party Congress, Xi declared the dawn of “a new era,” one in which China moves “closer to center stage.” He presented China as “a new option for other countries,” calling this alternative to Western democracy the zhongguo fang’an the “Chinese solution.”

Read the required articles, watch this video carefully and critically, analyze speakers’ key arguments, and participate in the discussion. The students must post at least one “primary response” up to 600 words (answering a discussion question) by 11:59 p.m. either on Wednesday or Thursday and one secondary response up to 300 words (response to other students’ posts) by 11:59 p.m. on Saturday).
https://youtu.be/wBrA2TDcNto

Required reading:
Betts, Richard. (2008).Conflict after the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace. Part II.
Part II.International Realism: Anarchy and Power
▪ Thucydides, “The Melian Dialogue”
▪ Niccolo Machiavelli, “Doing Evil in Order to Do Good”
▪ Thomas Hobbes, “The State of Nature”
▪ Edward Hallett Carr, “Realism and Idealism”
▪ Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory”
▪ Robert Gilpin, “Hegemonic War and International Change”
▪ Geoffrey Blainey, “Power, Culprits, and Arms”

Instructions:
Words of primary post answering the question: “Why I think that Realists are right or wrong in explaining the rise of China as a threat to peace?” (500 words)
Provide a rebuttal to a student post (250 words)

Post to rebut. This post was written by Juan Brenson
“Why I think that Realists are right or wrong in explaining the rise of China as a threat to peace?”
More assertively than the idealistic approaches of liberalism or constructivism, the realist tradition offers a gloomy, yet factual perspective of the collision course China and the United States face related to the Thucydides Trap.  After all, and despite the recognized opportunities for cooperation, realism assumes a constant state of conflict in the international system, often times armed, and only mitigated by the intervention of ‘Leviathan’ (Hobbes, 1651).  In such scenario, avoiding direct military clashes is considered peace, although a negative one since conflict management is conducted via intimidation and threat as it fails to consider unjust outcomes, balances of power, or resulting security dilemmas in turn nesting future conflicts.  In this landscape, peace becomes a temporary phase between wars where dissatisfied stakeholders constantly aim to change the status quo (GTS 6320 Supplemental Material).

The decade-old ‘Pivot to Asia’, perceived as the encirclement of Chinese aspirations to project power in the APAC region was recently reinvigorated by the QUAD and AUKUS alliances.  A very realist American-led muscle-flexing display departing from international consensus and institution-building that could lead to an arms race risking a ‘new Cold War’.  Debating with Yan Xuetong in 2013, John Mearsheimer illustrates the American fondness for China to focus on internal matters rather than roaming into the APAC and MENA regions, and then confidently towards the Western Hemisphere as its last global frontier (Mearsheimer, 2013).  Power politics explain how China’s rise poses a threat to global peace, not just from the merits of its remarkable growth, but also from the ensuing armed conflict—not inevitable but likely—as it will clash with American dominance (Mearsheimer, 2013).

Three decades ago, China opted to “hide your strength and bide your time” (Deng, 1990), and today the regime still downplays its blue-water navy build-up while shipyards continue warship outputs at record speed.  Some experts equalize Chinese and American capabilities by 2030 and warn of a real possibility for western defeat in a potential theater of operations nearby the first island chain (Lague & Kang Lim, 2018).  This landscape naturally makes the region anxious over unsettled border disputes in Taiwan, Tibet, India, Vietnam, and around the South China Sea.  The One-China Policy, the curtailing of civil rights in Hong-Kong, and the ‘artificial expansionism’ on the South China Sea are signs of what to expect from an increasingly powerful and revisionist Chinese regime.

Deep political divide in the US following disenchantment in liberal values and social inequalities from deregulated capitalism has diminished influence abroad.  Two decades of phony justifications on the ‘War on Terror’ have clouded global American prestige as ‘beacon of democracy’, even amongst its closest allies.  As the New Yorker piece portraits, the US has dramatically reduced international commitments and has failed to meet basic expectations while Chinese delegations eagerly ‘show up with the homework done’ ready to take the lead (Osnos, 2018).

China’s path is far from rosy, nevertheless.  Gross social inequalities, a sluggish growth of late, an energy crisis rationing power, a heavily polluted environment, and despotic population control under the ‘Zero Covid Policy’, in addition to the known censorships, are not minor challenges.  Beyond the crackdown on dissent, the communist party may overconfidently be betting on the patience of its collectivistic and docile population.  The Trump years may have cracked open wounds weakening American institutions and unity, but according to Joseph Nye cited by Evan Osnos, soft power comes from a free civil society and a system that censors expressions such as speech, religion, assembly, or access to information, losses its most brilliant thinkers and exposes the country to failure in the international arena (Osnos, 2018).

Recently, John Mearsheimer acknowledged that back in early 1990s realists succumbed to liberal victorious claims resulting from the fall of communism when the democratization of the world was assumed.  This view was leveraged by then-backward China to position itself as bottomless low-wage labor supply for western companies while uncontrolled technology transfers, foreign direct investment, and incorporation to forums such as WTO allowed the county to acquire knowledge, access world markets, pile up wealth, and build a powerhouse with global aspirations (Mearsheimer, 2021).

The Thucydides’ Trap remains at the core of human nature in family relations, in start-up companies disrupting industries, in regional cultural conflicts, as well as the individual domain.  Defensive reactions are logical when displacement from power is faced (Allison, 2017).  Thucydides was convinced that Sparta didn’t win the Peloponnesian War, and instead Athens lost it, and the reasons may include military might and strategy.  But the fact that Sparta was a tightly closed and controlled oligarchy while Athens remained a free democracy should not be minimized as internal divisions ultimately caused the Athenian defeat (Strauss, 2021).  While separated by ages, similarities are still striking and no less concerning to our issue at hand these days.

https://www.e-ir.info/2010/02/15/the-political-realism-of-thucydides-and-thomas-hobbes/ (Links to an external site.)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-american-pivot-to-asia/ (Links to an external site.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-23/why-the-aukus-quad-and-five-eyes-pacts-anger-china-quicktake (Links to an external site.)
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/586177-how-america-can-avoid-the-other-thucydides-trap?rl=1