Allison, the proposer of the Thucydides Trap: China and the United States should strive to avoid war

Beijing News Express (reporter Xie Lian) on April 6, the globalization think tank (CCG) held a CCG masters dialogue, CCG founder Wang Huiyao in dialogue with the founding dean of harvard University Kennedy School, the "Thucydides Trap" proposer Graham Allison, the two sides jointly discussed how China and the United States should avoid the Thucydides Trap. Allison proposed that China and the United States should seek cooperation in competition and avoid falling into the Thucydides trap as much as possible to avoid conflict and war.

The "Thucydides Trap", proposed by Graham Allison, mainly refers to the fact that the newly rising powers must challenge the existing powers, and the existing powers must respond to this threat, which makes war inevitable.

In a Dialogue between Chinese and American Scholars on April 6, Allison said that China, as a rising power, has accumulated many generations of efforts and will become stronger and stronger; the United States, as a conservative country, naturally believes that it should hold the right to rule and is the first in the world. Allison likens this phenomenon to a "seesaw of power", "China will become stronger and richer, and both sides will inevitably fall into the Thucydides trap, and the rise of one side will change the structure of power, triggering a power imbalance between the two ends of the seesaw of power".

In 2017, Allison published a monograph, Destined for World War I: Can the United States and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? 》。 The book mentions that over the past 500 years, there have been 16 Thucydides Trap paradigms, and only 4 have avoided war. As two nuclear-armed powers, China and the United States are "like conjoined twins, destroying each other will also destroy themselves," Allison said.

In the dialogue, Allison stressed that China and the United States are competitors on the one hand, and on the other hand, they have to cooperate on issues such as nature, science and technology, and the environment. How to make competition and cooperation coexist requires finding ways to avoid conflict and war. Allison proposed that China and the United States should find ways and mechanisms for coordination and cooperation to avoid falling into the Thucydides trap and destroying both sides.

"I think 'Thucydides' competition tends to lead to disastrous consequences, which is crazy, for both China and the United States. So the way out now is for us to find a way to avoid the Thucydides trap. We should do our best to find, to learn from the Cold War, to learn from the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, to learn as much as possible from the lessons of the past, to find a way out of all that is possible. Allison said.

Beijing News reporter Xie Lian

Edited by Zhang Lei, Proofreader Wu Xingfa