The year was 431 BC; the location, ancient Greece. Sparta was the dominant power in the region, but Athens was on the rise. Historians say a combination of ambition, fear and pressure from allies drove the two city-states to nearly three decades of warfare.

The Peloponnesian War, described by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hanson Baldwin as “a silly war that marked the failure of the most brilliant civilization in history,” ended with Athens’ defeat in 404 BC.

Now, a leading scholar argues in a new book, a similar combination of forces threatens to drive the United States and China down the same path, into what he calls the “Thucydides Trap” in recognition of the Greek historian who documented it.

Competing nations faced with such pressures more often than not turn to war to satisfy their desires to either seize or maintain supremacy, insists Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, in an interview with VOA.

But he says there are lessons in Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian War,” written 2,500 years ago, that can help major powers avoid being inadvertently dragged into conflicts by third parties, often their own allies.

Be clear about what China wants

Allison, who currently directs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, lays out his case for Beijing’s global ambition in his new book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

“China’s emergence as the number one power in Asia — and its aspiration to be number one in the world — reflects not just the imperative of economic growth, but also a supremacist world view bound up in Chinese identity,” he writes.

WATCH: Graham Allison on Xi and Chinese nationalism

Elaborating in an interview, Allison says the notion that China “just wants to be another responsible stakeholder, maintaining the order we are part of,” is wishful thinking.

“China wants to be predominant in Asia, as Teddy Roosevelt wanted to be in our hemisphere,” said Allison, referring to the U.S. president who proclaimed in 1904 that the United States had an exclusive right to settle international disputes in the Western Hemisphere.

However, “China’s objective is contrary to our objective; and we should be clear about that, and also be clear that China is not going to give up this objective.”

In his book, Allison says China’s ambition is causing “tectonic structural stress” on the international order. In response, he writes, the United States should consider all strategic options, “even the ugly ones,” which would include accommodating China’s ambitions without sacrificing America’s “vital interests.”

“Accommodation is not a bad word. Opponents seek to conflate it with appeasement. But the two are not synonymous in the realm of strategy. Accommodation is a serious effort to adapt to a new balance of power by adjusting relations with a serious competitor — in effect, making the best of unfavorable trends without resorting to military means,” Allison writes.

Narrowing down the range of “vital interests” could help nations avoid Thucydides’ Trap, he says.

“I don’t believe the U.S. has a vital interest in every island in the South China Sea,” he said, nor does he believe the U.S. should fight for “every claim made by the Philippines or Vietnam.” By the same token, he says Washington could reassess military deployment on the Korean Peninsula in the negotiating process with Beijing.

WATCH: Graham Allison on Thucydides and North Korea

Questioning Thucydides trap and US strategy

Critics of Allison reject both the notion of a Thucydides’s Trap and the merit of “accommodation.”

“Thucydides’s Trap is a myth, invented by theory-driven political scientists” and “a bumper sticker that we may expect to see on a lot of academic and policy elite cars,” said Arthur Waldron, a prominent historian and China scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Finding ways to “give China what it wants” is equal to “forgetting the lessons of so many previous wars: appeasement of aggressors is far more dangerous than measured confrontation.”

If there’s any pattern that could be traced between established and rising powers, Waldron says, it is that “powers that are rising or aspire to rise tend to move first, for it is only by crippling the other powers that could otherwise crush them that they can get ahead; they’re the ones that preempt,” while the established powers by contrast, he says, tend to “avert their eyes, seek negotiations, appease, but do not preempt.”

“Still, war seems likely” between the United States and China, according to Waldron. It will come “when China goes too far, for example by attacking Japan or Taiwan.”

The result, he predicts, will be that China’s government will fall and “Asia will be ravaged and wasted beyond imagining.”

Dangerous asymmetry

For his part, Allison thinks “one of the great assets of the U.S. is that in a free society, anybody can raise any idea and debate, and we think that through debate we learn.” By contrast, “part of the problem with the Chinese government and the system of government is that people are afraid and unwilling to raise questions that need to be debated.”

If no one in China dares to publicly debate topics such as reassessing China’s vital interests or avoiding war with the United States, and the only officially sanctioned narrative is what China can do to be more assertive, Allison warns, that this will not only create an “unhealthy environment” but also create a dangerous “asymmetry” in Beijing’s strategic thinking.

WATCH Graham Allison on the Geostrategic Challenge for US
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A leading scholar argues in a new book that a combination of forces threatens to drive the United States and China down the path to war, into what Graham Allison calls the “Thucydides Trap.”
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A leading scholar argues in a new book that a combination of forces threatens to drive the United States and China down the path to war, into what Graham Allison calls the “Thucydides Trap.”
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The Philippines’ defense chief says the militant leader of the group that has laid siege to a southern city is suspected to be hiding in a mosque there rather than fleeing the bombed-out city.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters the government received information Monday that Isnilon Hapilon is hiding in Marawi. His whereabouts are the subject of intelligence reports the military continues to try to verify.

The militants aligned with the Islamic State group attacked the city May 23 and are still putting up resistance to government forces who’ve retaken most of the city. The violence has left 459 people dead.

Lorenzana says intelligence reports show Hapilon was not among three fighters who fled Marawi and arrived on Basilan island, Hapilon’s stronghold.
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Indonesian officials said Monday a helicopter, carrying four rescue workers and four Navy officers, crashed on its way to help evacuate people from an active volcano killing all on board.

The helicopter crashed into a cliff Sunday in the Temanggung district of Central Java province. The Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency said all the bodies have been recovered.

The Navy officers and the rescue workers were slated to participate in the evacuation mission at Dieng Plateau, following Sunday’s eruption of a volcano that injured at least five people when it spewed cold lava, ash and mud as high as 50 meters. 

Dieng Plateau is a popular tourist attraction with its ninth-century Hindu temples.
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China’s growing use of advanced technology in a disputed Asian sea may be meant more to inspire its citizens and get respect from abroad than to double down on disputed sovereignty claims as feared by other countries, scholars and Chinese media reports say.

Maritime scholars believe these scientific advances will hand information to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, bolstering control over its claims over about 90 percent of the 3.5 square-million-kilometer South China Sea. But China is also looking to show citizens it can make achievements, some believe.

It may also be trying to impress other countries after a sting from the world court last year.

“We shouldn’t forget that tucked away there are these marine scientists, who they may not have control of policy, but they’re scientists like anyone else,” said Euan Graham, international security director with the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. “We shouldn’t tar them as being foot soldiers or proxies.”

When China announced last month it had finished five years of testing its Jiaolong bathyscaphe – an undersea observation vehicle — with plans for a wide-reaching probe in 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences predicted the mission would “earn the nation a bigger say” in deep-sea resource exploration.

The academy quoted a government official in May calling Beijing’s discovery of “combustible ice” natural gas hydrate in the South China Sea a “major breakthrough that may lead to a global energy revolution.”

And when Chinese scientists said in February their country would build its first underwater observation platform, the state-controlled Global Times news website quoted one saying the plan “showcases that the country is actively joining in the international competition.” The platform could be positioned in the South China Sea or East China Sea.

These cases suggest a Chinese effort to stoke domestic confidence in the Communist leadership to bring home resources through technology, scholars say. Even China’s military and space hardware is described domestically as technological rather than military advances.

“Jiaolong and (the aircraft carrier) Liaoning, those are the pilot programs that China would put on stamp collections specifically for the National People’s Congress,” said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan, referring to the Chinese parliament.

Chinese officials hope to show citizens they can secure resources for a 1.37 billion population and an industrial economy forecast to grow 6.7 percent this year, analysts say. They need cleaner-burning fuel to offset the pollution from coal burning, Graham said. Undersea probes may turn up oil and minerals including rare ones, Huang added.

“There is a competition for rare earths that are mostly preserved in the seabed, so Jiaolong can detect some useful resources, not necessarily for military operations but for industries and new technologies,” Huang said.

Deep-sea vehicles such as the Jiaolong bathyscaphe “offer new hopes of setting up deep-sea labs, where scientists can conduct biological, medical and genetic research and explore mineral, oil and gas resources,” the official Xinhua News Agency said in March.

China is trying to improve its reputation abroad, as well, by emphasizing the science angle of undersea activities after a world arbitration court tribunal ruled in July 2016 that China lacked a legal basis for its sovereignty claims to the sea, analysts believe.

The tribunal said in its ruling it found “no doubt that China’s artificial island-building activities on the seven reefs in the Spratly Islands have caused devastating and long-lasting damage to the marine environment.”

The Spratlys are the most heavily contested chain in the sea. Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines claim tracts that overlap China’s. Other countries resent the Chinese artificial buildup of islands in waters they call their own, usually based on exclusive economic zones 370 kilometers off their coasts.

That ruling contained “very pointed” language about Beijing’s environmental damage, Graham said, so China may now be on “a positive PR offensive.”

On that note, a city in China quickly declared off limits last year a geologically rare, 301-meter-deep (987-foot) ocean sinkhole inside one of the sea’s Paracel Islands, which Vietnam also claims. The city said it would preserve rather than develop land around the hole.

But efforts to stoke public pride and overseas confidence would not preclude a military link to new marine technology, said Jay Batoncbacal, director of the Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea at the University of the Philippines in Metro Manila. Technology, he said, can help a country “maintain, gain and exclude access” by staying ahead of rival inventions.

“China’s technology and available resources and available manpower, it’s just way too much,” he said. “For even all of them (other claimants) combined, they simply cannot match it.”

China has a record of using energy exploration projects “as a tool to stake a claim” in the South China Sea, American geopolitical intelligence platform Stratfor said in a 2012 commentary. “Indeed, deep-sea mining exploration could spread China’s influence in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Indian Ocean,” it said.
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A U.S. Navy destroyer sailed within 12 nautical miles of a tiny, disputed island in the South China Sea that is claimed by three Asian governments.  Triton Island is claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam.

China deployed military vessels and fighter jets to the area Sunday, accusing the USS Stethem of trespassing.

A U.S. government official said the Stethem was conducting a routine “right of innocent passage” exercise,” meant to demonstrate freedom of navigation in the disputed waters.

Lu Kang, China’s foreign ministry spokesman said, in a statement, the U.S. move was “a serious political and military provocation” and that such operations “violate China’s sovereignty and threaten China’s security.”

Authorities say the sailing of the Stethem within 12 nautical miles of the island was meant to indicate that the U.S. does not recognize territorial claims to the island.
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