Can history teach us how to avoid war between the US and China

[Music]

[Music]

i

got off the plane uh two days ago from

an intense week in china

if i look jet lagged shout at me and

i’ll wake up okay

i had a chance to talk and listen to the

leaders of the government

the academy think tanks business

community

and i can report to you that folks in

beijing

are almost as confused as people in

washington

and trying to understand what the hell

is going on

so from washington perspective

a country that for a generation

has been seen as a friend even a

strategic partner

is now officially classified as a quote

strategic adversary

a nation that president obama and before

him president bush and president clinton

tried to integrate into the global

community

is now seen as a threat as a disrupter

of the international order so what’s

going on

and what i’m going to try to do is

clarify as best i can what i think is

going on

and most importantly so what what

should we be doing to prevent this story

this rivalry

following the path that we’ve seen so

frequently

in previous history and what can people

like us do

to help think about this so

what i’m going to do is three things

first i’m going to present a

big idea i’m going to

resolve a prickly puzzle

and i’m gonna pose a cardinal challenge

the big idea is thrucidity strap

now i know thucydides is a mouthful

multi-syllabic

some people have difficulty pronouncing

it so who is this guy thucydides

and how do we pronounce his name one two

three thucydides

again one more time thucydides so if

nothing else today you can tweet or post

you met a great thinker you can

pronounce his name who was thucydides

he was the father and founder of history

he wrote the first ever history book

about

what happened in classical greece about

2500 years ago

and thucydides trap is a term

i coined a few years ago to make vivid

thucydides insight so thucydides insight

is that when a rising power like

athens or china today threatens to

displace a ruling power

like sparta or the u.s today

that creates a dangerous dynamic that

frequently ends in war real bloody

devastating war and then through city’s

famous line

it was the rise of athens and the fear

that this instilled in sparta

that made the war inevitable so that’s

lucidities and thucydides trap

now first i want to make a comment about

this trap

i find difficult because i even don’t

know how to pronounce its name

strap the thucydides trap thucydides

trap the thucidity’s trap

if it’s a disease trap okay so through

thucydides trap has entered the

bloodstream you now know who is

thucydides and what is lucidity strap

in my book i look at the last 500 years

of history i find 16 cases

16 times a rising power threatens to

displace a ruling power

12 of those cases end in war

four of those cases in the not war for

example

when spain rose to rival portugal

at about the time of christopher

columbus that ended in

no war the rivalry between us and the

soviet union

in the cold war ended in no war that is

no thousands of people being killed by

combatants

so to say that war between us and china

in this case is inevitable

would be wrong but to say that it would

be likely

would be correct one of the biggest

surprises

that came to me in the course of this

study

was that in most of the cases neither

the rising power nor the ruling power

wanted a war in few of the cases was the

war

initiated by either the rising power the

ruling power

so how does this happen and the answer

is

this rivalry creates a

level of misunderstanding and

misperception

that leaves both vulnerable to external

shocks

some third parties action or even an

accident

that then one of the other fields

obliged to respond to

that triggers a spiral of reactions that

drags them

to a place they don’t want to go the

classic case of this is world war one

in that case what happened so 1914

britain is the dominant power in the

world has been for 100 years

has an empire in which the sun never

sets

has a navy that’s ruled the waves for

100 years

germany is growing rapidly its national

economy overtakes

britain by about 1900 but both britain

and

germany do not want war with each other

in those circumstances in june 1914

a serbian assassin a terrorist

assassinates archduke franz ferdinand

just an accident the emperor

of us to hungary feels obliged to punish

the serbs

the russians uh feel obliged to come to

the support of this

of the serbs who are uh orthodox

christians

the french honor their military treaty

with the russians

the britons have gotten involved with

the french

so within six weeks all the nations are

caught up in a conflagration

at the end of which 25 million people

laid

in 25 million people

and in the flanders field

the poet puts it pointedly and you can

read that for yourself

where the puppies grow

three takeaways from this first you

don’t have to want war

to get war you may not be interested in

war but war may be interested in you

secondly at the end of world war one who

won

the answer was nobody everyone lost

every one of the leaders lost what he

cared about most

so the austro-hungarian emperor was

trying to hold together his empire

empire is dissolved he’s out russian

czar

his whole regime has been overthrown by

the bolsheviks

kaiser out france

bled of its youth for a whole generation

never really recovers as a great power

and britain which has been a creditor

for centuries

has turned into a debtor and on a slow

decline

uh from that from which they’ve not

recovered

so everyone lost and third

after the war one of the key players the

chancellor of germany

bateman was asked by a colleague well

how did you guys let this happen

and he said famously ah

if we only knew

so hold that thought ah if we only knew

john kennedy lived through a similar

crisis

like what happened in 1914 in what’s the

most dangerous

crisis in recorded human history the

cuban missile crisis

1962. in this event there was a face-off

between kennedy and khrushchev

the head of the soviet union kennedy

thought there was a one in three chance

that this would end in a nuclear war

that would have killed

uh hundreds of millions of people

fortunately

he had just two months earlier before

the crisis on vacation

read barbara tuchman’s wonderful little

book

called on world on world war one the

guns of august

and he determined and he was haunted by

bateman’s line

if we only knew so during the missile

crisis he kept looking over his shoulder

worrying that he wasn’t doing everything

he could conceivably do

to prevent this being the missiles of

october

that led to the third world war that

killed hundreds of millions of people

which it could indeed have done so

what to do what to do i’ve been on the

chase

since i sent this book to the publisher

three years ago

for how to escape through city’s trap

i’ve so far identified nine possible

avenues of escape

each one has pros and cons no one of

them seems to be yet compelling

so i’m hoping actually today to get some

further ideas i would like to have 10

11 12 13 and even after if you’re

thinking about it email me please

this first one actually came from a

viewer

of the first said talk i gave last

october

this is a lady who’s a student of

negotiation

and she said to me first in an email and

then in a conversation

in negotiation theory sometimes a good

technique

is to put the problem on one side of the

table

and the people who are negotiating on

the other side of the table

so externalize the problem identify

thucydides trap

and the vulnerability it creates for

dragging both parties to war

as the problem and then see how the two

parties

can work to prevent that happening well

what might that mean

is i suggest here in the first instance

it would be realism in recognizing

the vulnerability that comes from the

systemic

structural stress that china is going to

be rising and we’re going to be ruling

and that’s going to be friction so

recognize really

this is a rivalry that produces huge

risks

secondly ask ourselves what can we do to

prevent crises

that could drag us to war the two at the

top of my list right now are taiwan

and north korea and third recognizing

even if we do the best job we can

there still would be crises we should

prepare

be prepared for crisis crises to manage

them

so prepare for crisis management taiwan

is an especially dangerous situation

which you’ll hear more about in the next

10 months

as they run up to their presidential

election two of the key candidates right

now

are flirting with greater independence

for taiwan

china regards taiwan as unalterably

and unambiguously an integral part of

the chinese

landmass china is determined to fight

to prevent taiwan becoming independent

actually we’ve seen this story before in

1996 i was in the pentagon as an

assistant secretary of defense

a taiwanese president made small moves

towards independence

the chinese government responded

violently

by bracketing the island with missiles

which caused ships that were going to

the which are the lifeline to the

taiwanese island economy to stop going

because the military balance at the time

was overwhelmingly in america’s favor

the pentagon felt comfortable

recommending to president clinton

and i supported this and clinton decided

to move two u.s carriers up into the

area china was forced to back down

and what happened the day after that

from that day to this day china has been

deploying

offensive military capabilities to

prevent a scenario like this

ever happening again they now have

deployed

thousands of missiles on the mainland

that would be able to attack and sync

our carriers

or destroyers if we replayed the same

hand

in another taiwanese scenario so if i

were in the pentagon

today and we had a scenario like this i

would be very reluctant to recommend

what we recommended at that time so we

should with chinese

now today be sitting down vigorously

exploring how can we prevent this going

where we don’t want it to go

a second idea is even a little wilder

this would involve

inventing a whole new strategic

rationale

and combining two big ideas

one comes from ancient china

in the relationship between the sun

dynasty

and the liao which is about a thousand

years ago

and the second from john kennedy when he

after the cuban missile crisis

having been terrified by the prospect of

killing hundreds of millions of people

decided we had to change what we were

doing

so here in 2005

the liao and the sun agreed to have a

rivalry partnership

they would be fierce rivals in one arena

and partners in the other arena

that sounds like a contradiction but it

gave them 120 years of peace

what kind of a peace do i mean and what

kind of a peace do we seek

not a pax americana enforced in the

world by american weapons of war

and if we cannot end now our differences

at least we can help make the world

safe for diversity for in the final

analysis our most basic

common length is that we all inhabit

this small planet

we all breathe the same air we all

cherish our children’s future

and we are all mortal so could we

imagine

putting these two ideas together having

a rivalry partnership

in a world safe for diversity in which

americans would

compete to show that a freedom-based

democracy can better deliver what people

want

and the chinese can compete to show that

a party-led autocracy

can better deliver what people want we

compete in one arena

but in other arenas for example

preventing getting dragged to war

are trying to deal with a climate which

if each of us emits greenhouse gases

makes an unsustainable biosphere

managing the global economy

and financial crises this sounds like a

contradiction

but lo and behold in the business world

this is not that strange

so life is often more complex than

diplomacy apple

and samsung have a strange relationship

they

compete and cooperate together they sell

smartphones apple uh used to be the

dominant

cell phone supplier samsung has

overtaken it

so samsung the largest supplier

cellphone

but samsung is also the biggest supplier

of apple

so how can your fiercest competitor be

also your

biggest supplier on whom you’re

dependent

the answer is life can be complicated so

i’m thinking

this this is this is an interesting

arena

so there’s two uh small or modest

items on the list of nine i’m hoping

some of you will be able to add to the

list so

thank you very much

[Applause]