Thucydides's Trap

"As President Obama welcomes China’s new president, Xi Jinping, for an informal “shirt-sleeves” summit meeting in California on Friday, the bureaucracies of both governments must be quivering...

Let us hope that these two leaders will rise above their bureaucracies’ narrow goals to confront the overarching challenge facing the two most important nations in the world.

Simply put, can the United States and China escape Thucydides Trap?

Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill comment on the future of China and its possibilities. They note: "Only one individual has been called 'mentor' by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who initiated China’s march to the market, and its new leader Xi Jinping. Only one individual has been called upon for counsel about these developments by every U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. That individual is Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore."

Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill spotlight Lee Kuan Yew in their latest book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World.

Read an excerpt in The Australian from a new book on the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, by Belfer Center Director Graham Allison and Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill, with Belfer Center Associate Ali Wyne. The book is titled: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World.

Will China continue to grow three times faster than the United States to become the No. 1 economy in the world in the decade ahead? Does China aspire to be the No. 1 power in Asia and ultimately the world? As it becomes a great power, will China follow the path taken by Japan in becoming an honorary member of the West? Graham sAllison and Robert Blackwill suggest that while nobody knows the answer to these questions, the person they believe should be consulted for an answer is Lee Kuan Yew.

Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill provide a preview of their latest book, "Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World."

Both in the United States and abroad, many influential observers argue that the U.S. is in systemic decline. Not so, says Lee Kuan Yew, the sage of Singapore. Lee is not only a student of the rise and fall of nations.  He is also the founder of modern Singapore. As prime minister from 1959 to 1990, he led its rise from a poor, small, corrupt port to a first-world city-state in just one generation.

China’s increasingly aggressive posture towards the South China Sea and the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea is less important in itself than as a sign of things to come. For six decades after the second world war, an American “Pax Pacifica” has provided the security and economic framework within which Asian countries have produced the most rapid economic growth in history. However, having emerged as a great power that will overtake the US in the next decade to become the largest economy in the world, it is not surprising that China will demand revisions to the rules established by others.

When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound: extreme danger ahead. As the ancient Greek historian Thucydides explained in his history of the Peloponnesian War, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” 

Today, an irresistible rising China is on course to collide with an immovable America. Identifying clues from history to prevent violent conflict between Washington and Beijing has been the focus of a five-year research project led by Belfer Center Director Graham Allison, culminating in the May 30 publication of his latest book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?