‘WORSE THAN WW1’
Why history proves US war with China is inevitable unless we act now, according to leading world defence analyst
CHINA and the United States are heading for the "grandest collision in history" and a conflict more catastrophic than WWI, a leading defence expert has said.
According to Graham Allison there is a striking parallel with their rivalry and that between Britain and its challenger Germany before 1914.
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The United States has long been the world’s most powerful nation, just as Britain was.
But it now faces a challenge to its economic and military dominance in the shape of a fast rising China, just as Germany threatened Britain’s global dominance.
“Today, the intensifying rivalry between a rising China and a ruling United States could lead to a war that neither side wants and that both know would be even more catastrophic than World War I,” he wrote in the Washington Post.
Not only does the lesson of WWI tell us that war could happen, it has been a pattern that has existed for hundreds of years.
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“The past 500 years have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power. Twelve of those ended in war,” he said.
Allison said China’s President Xi Jin Ping wants to “make China great again”.
He has set an ambitious goal to make his country a military rival to the United States.
China has announced a military budget of £126bn, an eight per cent increase on last year.
It has also been developing a whole next-generation battery of weapons including hypersonic missiles and electromagnetic railguns.
The probable flashpoint for war is the South China Sea, where China has been building a chain of military bases on islands in disputed seas.
Chinese and US warships have been involved in a tense stand offs, which have threatened to escalate into conflict.
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“Americans have become accustomed to their place at the top of every pecking order,” said Harvard professor Allison in a recent TED talk.
“So the very idea of another country that could be as big and strong as the US strikes, many Americans as an assault on who they are."
He said he foresees a "seemingly unstoppable, rising China accelerating towards and apparently immovable, ruling US - on course for what could be the grandest collision in history".
He said the US-China rivalry also has parallels in ancient Greece, when upstart Athens challenged established Sparta.
The conflict was chronicled by Thucydides, regarded as the first historian, and Allison has coined the phrase the Thucydides Trap to describe rivalries between upcoming and established powers.
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“In very few of these did either of the protagonists want a war,” he said.
“Few of these wars were initiated by either the rising power or the ruling power.
“So how does this work? A third party’s provocation forces one or the other to react and that sets in motion a spiral which drags the two to some place they don’t want to go.
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“Are we going to follow in the footsteps of history or can we through a combination of imagination and common sense and courage find a way to manage this rivalry without a war nobody wants and everybody knows would be catastrophic?
“That’s the issue I’ve been pursuing passionately for the past two years.”
He said the good news is that leaders are aware what’s happening but the bad news is that “nobody has a feasible plan for escaping history as usual”.
Allison said after WWII, world leaders had a “collective surge of imagination” that created the post war world order that has prevented great power conflict.
“In a word what we need to do is do it again," he said.
“We need a surge of imagination, creativity informed by history…only those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeated it.”
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