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Photo of Chinese staffers adjust U.S. and Chinese flags before the opening session of trade negotiations between U.S. and Chinese trade representatives at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019.

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Affairs

The New Spheres of Influence

| March/April 2020

Unipolarity is over, and with it the illusion that other nations would simply take their assigned place in a U.S.-led international order. For the United States, that will require accepting the reality that there are spheres of influence in the world today—and that not all of them are American spheres.

China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Gen. Li Zuocheng, left, and U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, center, review an honor guard during a welcome ceremony at the Bayi Building in Beijing. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool

Analysis & Opinions - The Washington Post

Is war between a rising China and a dominant America inevitable? A thought experiment.

| June 28, 2017

Chinese analysts, from President Xi Jinping on down, have nominally rejected Allison’s pessimistic analysis. “There is no Thucydides Trap,” Xi has argued, claiming that he had devised an alternative “new type of great-power relations” that would avoid war by recognizing that each Asian giant had its own legitimate interests. More recently, he has shifted to arguing that “China and the U.S. must do everything possible to avoid [the] Thucydides Trap.”