As Trump and Xi prepare to meet, Gideon Rachman looks at the tests ahead for the world’s most important bilateral relationship
As Xi Jinping prepares to meet Donald Trump in Florida next week, his staff might do well to get hold of an advance copy of an important new book by Graham Allison on US-Chinese relations — which bears the doom-laden title Destined for War. The Chinese president is already familiar with the work of Allison, a professor of government at Harvard. In November 2013, I attended a meeting with President Xi in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where he told a group of western visitors: “We must all work together to avoid Thucydides’ trap.” The phrase, a reference to the ancient Greek historian’s observations about the war between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century BC, was coined by Allison to describe the dangers of a period in which an established great power is challenged by a rising power. Allison, the author of a classic study of the Cuban missile crisis, calculates that in 12 out of 16 such cases, the rivalry has ended in open conflict. This time, he argues, may be no different: “China and the United States are currently on a collision course for war — unless both parties take difficult and painful actions to avert it.” A project that Allison and his colleagues ran at Harvard examined multiple cases “in which a major nation’s rise has disrupted the position of a dominant state”, concluding that “the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule not the exception”. In his new book, only two of these historical examples are examined in substantial detail — the original clash between Athens and Sparta, and Anglo-German rivalry before the first world war (the latter a parallel that has also preoccupied Henry Kissinger). Of the other 10 examples that Allison examines more briefly, some are intriguing as guides to the future, while others seem less convincing. The closest analogy to the current situation may be Japan’s challenge to American and British dominance in the Pacific in the first half of the 20th century — a rivalry that did culminate in war. The role played by naval power in that contest, as well as the way in which economic rivalry slid into military conflict, are both uncomfortably reminiscent of the rise in US-Chinese tensions today.
But some of the other parallels raised by Allison seem to fit the Thucydides’s trap model less closely. It is not obvious that the cold war is best understood as a rivalry between a rising and established power. Rather, the US and the USSR both emerged as victors from the second world war, and established rival ideological systems and zones of influence in a bipolar system. The cold war is also one of only two rivalries examined by Allison that took place after the invention of nuclear weapons. The fact that neither of the nuclear age power-shifts (the other is listed as the rise of a unified Germany) ended in war raises the obvious question of whether these weapons have ended Thucydides’s trap, by making it unthinkably dangerous for a rising nation to go to war with an established power. This is a question considered by Allison but one, inevitably, to which he cannot provide a conclusive answer. Most scholars and soldiers who have looked closely at how a US-China war might actually break out have tended to argue that, in a nuclear age, neither side is likely to go to war deliberately. But a limited clash, perhaps in the South China Sea, could easily escalate into something more serious. In a brief preface written after the election of Donald Trump, Allison argues: “If Hollywood were to make a movie pitting China against the United States, central casting could not find two better leading actors than Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Each personifies his country’s deep aspirations of national greatness.” More dangerously, both men “identify the nation ruled by the other as the principal obstacle to their dream”. A big difference, however, may be that Xi’s vision of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” seems much more fully formed than that of the new US president. As the journalist and academic Howard French tells it in Everything Under the Heavens, China’s leader is essentially seeking to return his country to the position it has traditionally exercised in Asia — as the dominant regional power, to which other countries must defer or pay tribute. “For the better part of two millennia, the norm for China, from its own perspective, was a natural dominion over everything under heaven,” writes French. In practice, this meant “a vast and familiar swath of geography that consisted of nearby Central Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia”.
This traditional Chinese aspiration had to be shelved for almost two centuries. From the mid-19th century, China was humbled by powerful outsiders — first European imperialists and then Japanese invaders. After the Communist victory in 1949, the country went through a period of economic and cultural isolation and relative poverty. By the late 1970s, when China reversed course and embraced capitalism and foreign investment, it had fallen far behind the “tiger economies” of east Asia. In its catch-up phase, China pursued friendly relations with its capitalist neighbours — including Japan, its old wartime foe. These Asian neighbours were important sources of expertise and foreign investment for a country that was desperate to make up for lost time. But French, like many observers, sees a change of mood and tone in China’s relationship with the outside world since Xi came to power in 2012. The primary target of Chinese muscle-flexing and ambition is not, in fact, the US — but Japan. “As China’s self-regard has swollen, along with its newfound power, Japan has returned to the center of the Chinese gaze in the form of a bull’s-eye,” writes French. Much Chinese resentment of Japan is focused on the Japanese invasion and occupation of the 1930s. But, as French makes clear, the roots of the resentment stretch deep into the 19th century. In one of the most compelling sections of this fluent and interesting book, French shows the importance of Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands in 1879. These islands retain their significance today, as they include Okinawa — the site of the largest US military base in east Asia. The current focus of territorial disputes between Japan and China is the much smaller set of islands known as the Senkakus to the Japanese and the Diaoyu to the Chinese. But reading French’s book, one cannot but wonder whether Chinese ambitions will also eventually encompass Okinawa. America’s close alliance with Japan means that it is inevitably deeply implicated in the rising tensions between China and Japan. Some Chinese nationalists may hope that the US will eventually pull back from the western Pacific and allow China an unblocked path to restoring its traditional sphere of influence. However, they are likely to be disappointed. As Michael Green observes in By More Than Providence, “If there is one central theme in American strategic culture as it has applied to the Far East over time, it is that the United States will not tolerate any other power establishing exclusive hegemonic control over Asia and the Pacific.” The message could not be clearer for Xi’s China.
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