Is war between China and the US inevitable Graham Allison
So, let me thank you
for the opportunity to talk about
the biggest international story
of your professional lifetime,
which is also the most important
international challenge
the world will face
for as far as the eye can see.
The story, of course,
is the rise of China.
Never before have so many people
risen so far so fast,
on so many different dimensions.
The challenge is the impact
of China’s rise –
the discombobulation
this will cause the Unites States
and the international order,
of which the US has been
the principal architect and guardian.
The past 100 years have been what
historians now call an “American Century.”
Americans have become
accustomed to their place
at the top of every pecking order.
So the very idea of another country
that could be as big and strong
as the US – or bigger –
strikes many Americans
as an assault on who they are.
For perspective on what
we’re now seeing in this rivalry,
it’s useful to locate it
on the larger map of history.
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.
So just in November, we’ll all pause
to mark the 100th anniversary
of the final day of a war
that became so encompassing,
that it required historians to create
an entirely new category: world war.
So, on the 11th hour of the 11th day
of the 11th month in 1918,
the guns of World War I fell silent,
but 20 million individuals lay dead.
I know that this
is a sophisticated audience,
so you know about the rise of China.
I’m going to focus, therefore,
on the impact of China’s rise,
on the US, on the international order
and on the prospects for war and peace.
But having taught at Harvard
over many years,
I’ve learned that from time to time,
it’s useful to take a short pause,
just to make sure we’re all
on the same page.
The way I do this is, I call a time-out,
I give students a pop quiz –
ungraded, of course.
So, let’s try this. Time-out, pop quiz.
Question:
forty years ago, 1978, China sets out
on its march to the market.
At that point, what percentage
of China’s one billion citizens
were struggling to survive
on less than two dollars a day?
Take a guess – 25 percent?
Fifty?
Seventy-five?
Ninety.
What do you think?
Ninety.
Nine out of every 10
on less than two dollars a day.
Twenty eighteen, 40 years later.
What about the numbers?
What’s your bet?
Take a look.
Fewer than one in 100 today.
And China’s president has promised
that within the next three years,
those last tens of millions
will have been raised up
above that threshold.
So it’s a miracle, actually,
in our lifetime.
Hard to believe.
But brute facts are even harder to ignore.
A nation that didn’t even appear
on any of the international league tables
25 years ago
has soared,
to rival – and in some areas,
surpass – the United States.
Thus, the challenge
that will shape our world:
a seemingly unstoppable rising China
accelerating towards an apparently
immovable ruling US,
on course for what could be
the grandest collision in history.
To help us get our minds
around this challenge,
I’m going to introduce you
to a great thinker,
I’m going to present a big idea,
and I’m going to pose a most
consequential question.
The great thinker is Thucydides.
Now, I know his name is a mouthful,
and some people
have trouble pronouncing it.
So, let’s do it, one,
two, three, together:
Thucydides.
One more time: Thucydides.
So who was Thucydides?
He was the father and founder of history.
He wrote the first-ever history book.
It’s titled “The History
of the Peloponnesian War,”
about the war in Greece, 2500 years ago.
So if nothing else today,
you can tweet your friends,
“I met a great thinker.
And I can even pronounce
his name: Thucydides.”
So, about this war
that destroyed classical Greece,
Thucydides wrote famously:
“It was the rise of Athens
and the fear that this instilled in Sparta
that made the war inevitable.”
So the rise of one
and the reaction of the other
create a toxic cocktail of pride,
arrogance, paranoia,
that drug them both to war.
Which brings me to the big idea:
Thucydides’s Trap.
“Thucydides’s Trap” is a term
I coined several years ago,
to make vivid Thucydides’s insight.
Thucydides’s Trap is the dangerous
dynamic that occurs
when a rising power threatens
to displace a ruling power,
like Athens –
or Germany 100 years ago,
or China today –
and their impact on Sparta,
or Great Britain 100 years ago,
or the US today.
As Henry Kissinger has said,
once you get this idea, this concept
of Thucydides’s Trap in your head,
it will provide a lens
for helping you look through
the news and noise of the day
to understand what’s actually going on.
So, to the most consequential question
about our world today:
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?
Give me five minutes to unpack this,
and later this afternoon, when the next
news story pops up for you
about China doing this,
or the US reacting like that,
you will be able to have a better
understanding of what’s going on
and even to explain it to your friends.
So as we saw with this flipping
the pyramid of poverty,
China has actually soared.
It’s meteoric.
Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel,
I think, put it best.
He said, “All this has happened so fast,
we haven’t yet had time to be astonished.”
(Laughter)
To remind myself
how astonished I should be,
I occasionally look out the window
in my office in Cambridge
at this bridge, which goes
across the Charles River,
between the Kennedy School
and Harvard Business School.
In 2012, the State of Massachusetts said
they were going to renovate this bridge,
and it would take two years.
In 2014, they said it wasn’t finished.
In 2015, they said
it would take one more year.
In 2016, they said it’s not finished,
we’re not going to tell you
when it’s going to be finished.
Finally, last year, it was finished –
three times over budget.
Now, compare this to a similar bridge
that I drove across last month in Beijing.
It’s called the Sanyuan Bridge.
In 2015, the Chinese decided
they wanted to renovate that bridge.
It actually has twice as many
lanes of traffic.
How long did it take for them
to complete the project?
Twenty fifteen, what do you bet?
Take a guess – OK, three –
Take a look.
(Laughter)
The answer is 43 hours.
(Audience: Wow!)
(Laughter)
Graham Allison: Now, of course,
that couldn’t happen in New York.
(Laughter)
Behind this speed in execution
is a purpose-driven leader
and a government that works.
The most ambitious
and most competent leader
on the international stage today
is Chinese President Xi Jinping.
And he’s made no secret
about what he wants.
As he said when he became
president six years ago,
his goal is to make China great again –
(Laughter)
a banner he raised long before
Donald Trump picked up a version of this.
To that end, Xi Jinping has announced
specific targets for specific dates:
2025, 2035, 2049.
By 2025, China means to be
the dominant power
in the major market
in 10 leading technologies,
including driverless cars, robots,
artificial intelligence,
quantum computing.
By 2035, China means to be
the innovation leader
across all the advanced technologies.
And by 2049, which is
the 100th anniversary
of the founding of the People’s Republic,
China means to be
unambiguously number one,
including, [says] Xi Jinping,
an army that he calls “Fight and Win.”
So these are audacious goals,
but as you can see,
China is already well on its way
to these objectives.
And we should remember
how fast our world is changing.
Thirty years ago,
the World Wide Web had not
yet even been invented.
Who will feel the impact
of this rise of China most directly?
Obviously, the current number one.
As China gets bigger
and stronger and richer,
technologically more advanced,
it will inevitably bump up against
American positions and prerogatives.
Now, for red-blooded Americans –
and especially for red-necked Americans
like me; I’m from North Carolina –
there’s something wrong with this picture.
The USA means number one,
that’s who we are.
But again, to repeat:
brute facts are hard to ignore.
Four years ago, Senator John McCain
asked me to testify about this
to his Senate Armed Services Committee.
And I made for them a chart
that you can see,
that said, compare the US and China
to kids on opposite ends
of a seesaw on a playground,
each represented by the size
of their economy.
As late as 2004,
China was just half our size.
By 2014, its GDP was equal to ours.
And on the current trajectory,
by 2024, it will be half again larger.
The consequences of this tectonic change
will be felt everywhere.
For example, in the current
trade conflict,
China is already
the number one trading partner
of all the major Asian countries.
Which brings us back
to our Greek historian.
Harvard’s “Thucydides’s Trap Case File”
has reviewed the last 500 years of history
and found 16 cases in which a rising power
threatened to displace a ruling power.
Twelve of these ended in war.
And the tragedy of this
is that in very few of these
did either of the protagonists want a war;
few of these wars were initiated
by either the rising power
or the ruling power.
So how does this work?
What happens is,
a third party’s provocation
forces one or the other to react,
and that sets in motion a spiral,
which drags the two somewhere
they don’t want to go.
If that seems crazy, it is.
But it’s life.
Remember World War I.
The provocation in that case
was the assassination
of a second-level figure,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
which then led
the Austro-Hungarian emperor
to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,
they dragged in the various allies,
within two months,
all of Europe was at war.
So imagine if Thucydides were watching
planet Earth today.
What would he say?
Could he find a more appropriate
leading man for the ruling power
than Donald J Trump?
(Laughter)
Or a more apt lead for the rising
power than Xi Jinping?
And he would scratch his head
and certainly say he couldn’t think
of more colorful provocateur
than North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
Each seems determined
to play his assigned part
and is right on script.
So finally, we conclude again
with the most consequential question,
the question that will have
the gravest consequences
for the rest of our lives:
Are Americans and Chinese going to let
the forces of history drive us to a war
that would be catastrophic for both?
Or can we summon
the imagination and courage
to find a way to survive together,
to share the leadership
in the 21st century,
or, as Xi Jinping [said], to create
a new form of great power relations?
That’s the issue I’ve been
pursuing passionately
for the last two years.
I’ve had the opportunity to talk
and, indeed, to listen
to leaders of all
the relevant governments –
Beijing, Washington, Seoul, Tokyo –
and to thought leaders across the spectrum
of both the arts and business.
I wish I had more to report.
The good news is that leaders
are increasingly aware
of this Thucydidean dynamic
and the dangers that it poses.
The bad news is that
nobody has a feasible plan
for escaping history as usual.
So it’s clear to me
that we need some ideas
outside the box
of conventional statecraft –
indeed, from another page
or another space –
which is what brings me to TED today
and which brings me to a request.
This audience includes many
of the most creative minds on the planet,
who get up in the morning and think
not only about how to manage
the world we have,
but how to create worlds that should be.
So I’m hopeful that as this sinks in
and as you reflect on it,
some of you are going to have
some bold ideas, actually some wild ideas,
that when we find, will make
a difference in this space.
And just to remind you if you do,
this won’t be the first time.
Let me remind you of what happened
right after World War II.
A remarkable group of Americans
and Europeans and others,
not just from government, but from
the world of culture and business,
engaged in a collective
surge of imagination.
And what they imagined
and what they created
was a new international order,
the order that’s allowed you and me
to live our lives, all of our lives,
without great power war
and with more prosperity
than was ever seen before on the planet.
So, a remarkable story.
Interestingly, every pillar of this
project that produced these results,
when first proposed,
was rejected by the foreign
policy establishment
as naive or unrealistic.
My favorite is the Marshall Plan.
After World War II,
Americans felt exhausted.
They had demobilized 10 million troops,
they were focused on
an urgent domestic agenda.
But as people began to appreciate
how devastated Europe was
and how aggressive Soviet communism was,
Americans eventually decided
to tax themselves
a percent and a half of GDP
every year for four years
and send that money to Europe
to help reconstruct these countries,
including Germany and Italy,
whose troops had just
been killing Americans.
Amazing.
This also created the United Nations.
Amazing.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The World Bank.
NATO.
All of these elements of an order
for peace and prosperity.
So, in a word, what we need
to do is do it again.
And I think now we need a surge
of imagination, creativity,
informed by history,
for, as the philosopher
Santayana reminded us,
in the end, only those
who refuse to study history
are condemned to repeat it.
Thank you.
(Applause)