Reddit reviews Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

One thing that Westerners need to get through their heads is that China will never be like them. I'm going to quote excerpts from Graham Allison's recent book:

>These philosophical differences between China and the US are reflected in each country’s concept of government. The American idea was summed up in the most widely read pamphlet during the American Revolution, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. In it, Paine explained, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

>The Chinese conception of government and its role in society could hardly be more different. History has taught the Chinese the primacy of order and the indispensability of government in achieving that order. As Lee Kuan Yew observed, “The country’s history and cultural records show that when there is a strong center (Beijing or Nanjing), the country is peaceful and prosperous. When the center is weak, then the provinces and their counties are run by little warlords.”

Going on:

>Americans urge other powers to accept a “rule-based international order.” But through Chinese eyes, this appears to be an order in which Americans make the rules, and others obey the orders. A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, became familiar with the predictable resentment this elicited from China. “One of the things that fascinated me about the Chinese is whenever I would have a conversation with them about international standards or international rules of behavior, they would inevitably point out that those rules were made when they were absent from the world stage,” Dempsey remarked. “They are no longer absent from the world stage, and so those rules need to be renegotiated with them.”

This attitude comes from the "Century of humiliation" rhetoric that you highlighted.

Moreover:

>In Kissinger’s apt summary, “The conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate." He goes on to explain how this tenet, which we take for granted, predictably breeds resentment among nations who are made to feel they live in a benighted political system awaiting redemption by American values. Needless to say, this type of righteousness does not go over well in China.

All emphasis added. The current Chinese government derives its mandate from performance not democratic consent.

>China scholar Mark Elliott has highlighted “a bright line drawn directly from empire to republic. The People’s Republic has become the successor state of the Qing . . . and increasingly has come to rely upon this equation for its legitimacy...”

>As Geoff Dyer has explained, “The Communist Party has faced a slow-burning threat to its legitimacy ever since it dumped Marx for the market.” Thus the Party has evoked past humiliations at the hands of Japan and the West “to create a sense of unity that had been fracturing, and to define a Chinese identity...

> As Lee Kuan-Yew put it pointedly, “If you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China for democracy, you are wrong. Where are the students of Tiananmen now?” he asked provocatively. And he answered bluntly: “They are irrelevant. The Chinese people want a revived China.”So long as Xi can deliver on his promise to restore China’s past greatness, the Party’s future (and his own) would seem secure.

If the West's position is that the CCP is somehow illegitimate, tensions will prevail. Always. I'm a pretty harsh critic of the CCP, however, I have to come down equally as hard on Western sanctimony. While I acknowledge the CCP's abuses, and they are many, I also recognise that they have managed to do something unprecedented in human history: lifted roughly 600 million people out of poverty.

I speak as someone who has traveled to and across China extensively over the past 20 years.

Agree. I'm just not sure the way we're headed it won't happen. But the Thucydides's Trap is real and historically proven. If you haven't read the book by same name by Graham Allison, you should. Harvard Prof level book.

There is another book making rounds about similar issue.

Though haven't read it sounds much more scary - "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?" by Graham Allison

https://www.amazon.com/Destined-War-America-Escape-Thucydidess/dp/0544935276

Graham Allison goes on to write a book about the subject:

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?: Graham Allison: 9780544935273: Amazon.com: Books https://www.amazon.com/Destined-War-America-Escape-Thucydidess/dp/0544935276/

CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES ARE HEADING TOWARD A WAR NEITHER WANTS. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war.

In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today.

Wow you really are full of yourself. Honestly, you're not coming off as very knowledgeable of anything, quite frankly.

Read:

https://www.amazon.com/Destined-War-America-Escape-Thucydidess/dp/0544935276

https://www.amazon.com/Can-Asians-Think-Kishore-Mahbubani/dp/9814276014

https://www.amazon.com/When-China-Rules-World-Western/dp/0143118005

https://www.amazon.com/World-Disarray-American-Foreign-Policy/dp/0399562362

https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Kuan-Yew-Insights-International/dp/0262019124