MATT JAFFE: Good afternoon.
I'm Matt Jaffe.
I'm the interim executive director at the IOP.
This afternoon, we are honored to welcome
Graham Allison to discuss his new book, Destined for War: Can
America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
We are really grateful to our partners at the Paulson
Institute and Harris Public Policy
for helping to make this event possible.
And I wanted to note that this event today is
the first in Paulson's Contemporary China series
that is a monthly series.
And the next one will be occurring on November the 3rd.
Before we begin, I also wanted to plug an upcoming
Institute of Politics event.
We will be welcoming Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro
on Monday.
Rosa DeLauro is the representative
for Connecticut's 3rd Congressional District.
She will be here discussing her new book
about the social safety net.
And she'll be signing copies after the program.
That conversation will be moderated by Crystal Coats.
Crystal is the Director of Civic Engagement at the IOP.
You can sign up for that event.
You can also sign up for other IOP events at our website,
politics.uchicago.edu.
Also, I wanted to mention a few housekeeping
notes about today's event.
Towards the second half of the conversation,
we will open up the floor to take questions
from you in the audience.
If you have a question, please raise your hand, and a mic
will be passed around to you.
And as always, at IOP events, we will give priority
to student questions, and the first three questions
will be asked by students.
Now, here to formally introduce our speaker is Ronen Schatsky.
Ronen is a second-year student from New York City.
He is here studying public policy and economics.
Ronen has been deeply involved in the IOP Fellows Program
where he is currently a team leader for our Fellows
Ambassadors.
Please join me in welcoming Ronen to the podium.
[APPLAUSE]
RONEN SCHATSKY: As Americans, it's
easy to feel that the danger of war
is something we've left far behind.
But we should never be lulled into a false sense of security.
Advanced as we are, enlightened as we are,
there are grim patterns in international politics
that repeat themselves throughout history.
And right now, tensions with China
raise the very real question whether 10, 20 years down
the line, our two countries could find ourselves
in a serious confrontation.
To give us some crucial insight on this question,
we are fortunate to have with us here
Dr. Graham Allison in a discussion with Dr. Evan A.
Feigenbaum.
Dr. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor
of Government at Harvard's Kennedy School
where he served as dean in its formative years.
For decades, he has led the way in revolutionizing our approach
to foreign policy.
He ultimately went on to share his expertise in the Reagan
and Clinton administrations.
Under Bill Clinton, as Assistant Secretary of Defense,
he orchestrated the safe removal of thousands of nuclear weapons
from former Soviet countries.
This earned him the DOD's highest civilian award,
the Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Until just this past July, Dr. Allison
was also the director of Harvard's acclaimed Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs.
Dr. Feigenbaum is the vice chairman of the Paulson
Institute here at U of Chicago.
A longtime Asia expert, he led much
of the Bush administration's Asia policy
in the state department, working closely
with Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
Recently, Dr. Allison has been thinking a lot about China.
He's observed that a proud nation on the rise
will often clash with an established power,
paranoid that its time is up.
He calls this phenomenon the Thucydides's trap.
In his book, Destined for War, Dr. Allison
examines this pattern as it has manifested itself over time
and applies his analysis to our current relationship
with China.
So should we be worried?
Should we all start learning Chinese characters right away?
Let's see what the experts have to say.
Please join me in welcoming Drs.
Graham Allison and Evan Feigenbaum.
[APPLAUSE]
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: It's a great pleasure and honor for me
to be here [INAUDIBLE] today, especially
to be doing an event with the Institute of Politics
since [INAUDIBLE] was talking about creating it,
I talked to him a lot since we have an Institute of Politics
at the Kennedy School.
And in particular, to share the stage
with Evan Feigenbaum, a colleague
for a couple of decades, from the period in which initially I
hired him at the Belfer Center to open our China project.
And he began explaining to me, who
had not been interested in China before that.
You know, China-- you should probably think about China.
It took me a while.
Just little by little, I'm a slow learner.
But over time, I came to focus on China.
And my old professor at Harvard, Henry Kissinger,
kept telling me the same thing.
And I was trying to do a book on Lee Kuan Yew,
and Lee Kuan Yew kept saying the same thing.
Maybe I should remember what Evan told me in the beginning.
DR. EVAN FEIGENBAUM: But you didn't learn Chinese.
[LAUGHTER]
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: If I were smarter or more
agile with language, I would have learned Chinese.
And if I were you giving you one piece of advice
for those of your students, I applaud your efforts
to learn Mandarin.
I'd say that's a--
I would like to speak English first.
But I would speak Mandarin second.
In any case, let me give you the-- in about 10 minutes,
quick--
the elevator version of the argument for the book, which
I hope you'll become interested in, and you'll get a copy
and you'll read.
So I'm going to, as the book does,
introduce you or, for most of you, I hope,
re-introduce you to a great thinker.
I'm going to present a big idea.
And then I'm going to pose a most consequential question.
So the big thinker is Thucydides.
Now, having published this book about three months or four
months ago, I've discovered, in talking
about it in various places, two things about Americans.
First, they don't like multi-syllabic.
That's challenging.
And second, Thucydides is a mouthful.
So, for sure, you're going to at least learn
one thing here today--
how to pronounce this fellow's name.
We're going to do it in unison-- one, two, three.
ALL: Thucydides.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: One more time.
ALL: Thucydides.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: So who was Thucydides?
He was the father and founder of history.
He wrote the first ever history book.
It's called The History of the Peloponnesian War.
History, as he defined it, being the account of what
actually happened--
the choices of human beings and their consequences
without the benefit of mythology or spirits
or other external themes.
So the father of history.
And you could actually download his book
for free, his History of the Peloponnesian War.
Read just the first 100 pages, book one,
and if it doesn't knock your socks off, I'll be surprised.
So the big idea, Thucydides trap--
this is a term I coined about six years ago
to make vivid Thucydides's insight about what
happens when a rising power threatens
to displace a ruling power.
And Thucydides's proposition and Thucydides trap
is the dangerous dynamic that occurs
when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power.
Thucydides observed this phenomena in classical Greece.
As Athens rose, they challenged Sparta,
which had been the dominant power in Greece for 100 years.
In the book, I have a chapter on World War I
and the rise of Germany, which impacted Britain, which
had ruled the world in an empire in which the sun never
set for 100 years and China as it's
been rising over the past generation to challenge the US.
So just in a word--
Thucydides's trap is the dangerous dynamic that occurs.
And, in general, when a rising power
threatens to displace a ruling power, poop happens.
So I look at the last 500 years in the book.
I find 16 cases in which a rising power threatened
to displace a ruling power.
Twelve ended in war, four in not war.
So Thucydides's line about inevitable is hyperbole.
That's an exaggeration.
But to say the odds are not good would not be.
Finally, the consequential question,
as I think the introduction already suggested,
the subtitle of the book is called Can America and China
Escape Thucydides's Trap?
And that's a big question.
And my answer on that in the book is rather professorial.
I apologize, but that's my job.
So the answer is no and yes.
[LAUGHTER]
So no.
If the US and China insist on business as usual, and that's
how I would characterize the last 20 years in relations
between the US and China, both under Democratic and Republican
administrations, then I think we should expect history as usual.
And history as usual, in this case,
would be a war, even a catastrophic war,
despite the fact that nobody wants a war.
But yes, we can escape Thucydides's trap
if we take to heart Santayana's great line,
"Only those who refuse to study history
are condemned to repeat it."
So there's no obligation that we make the mistakes that have
been made in previous cases.
But if we insist on business as usual, we're likely to.
So that's the big picture.
WANG XUEXIAN: Now first, I want to make
a comment about this trap.
I find it difficult because I don't even
know how to pronounce his name.
GENERAL MARK MILLEY: You know, the Thucydidean
trap that people talk about.
XI JINPING: The so-called Thucydides trap--
FAREED ZAKARIA: The Thucydides's trap.
TOM DONILON: Thucydides's trap.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: The Thucydides's trap.
JOHN KERRY: Thucydides's trap.
GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: The Thucydides's trap.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: So this idea has made its way quickly
into the policy debate.
Xi Jinping picked it up early on and has actually
been challenging the Chinese strategic community
to think about how to escape Thucydides trap.
But that was a topic of conversation between Obama
and Xi at Sunnylands--
a general part of the conversation.
For those of you for whom this still seems, especially
undergraduates, a little far fetched, Thucydides
is now even more famous.
The blockbuster of the year is a movie called Wonder Woman.
I'm not going to tell you all about the movie,
but in any case, at one point, she's
trying to impress Ludendorff, who's
the military leader of Germany at the end of World War I,
that they should stop the war.
She's come to stop the war.
And he tells her, "Peace is only an armistice
in an endless war," thinking that he's
going to put her down.
And she says immediately, "Thucydides."
And he's flummoxed.
So particularly for those of you who
want to make sure you're ready in case somebody
gives you a quote, answer, "Thucydides."
In the longer version of this, I organized the comments
as answers to three questions.
So I'll state three questions.
I'll give you my tweet-sized answer.
And then I'll say just a word about each.
First question-- what has been the geopolitical event
of the last 25 years, of this past generation?
Second question-- what will be the geostrategic challenge
for the next 25 years, as far as we can see?
And the third question is, can the US and China
escape Thucydides's trap?
Or are we going to find ourselves in a war?
In answer to the first question, the geopolitical event
of the past quarter century has been the rise of China.
Never before has a country risen so far, so fast,
on so many different dimensions.
Most of us haven't been watching.
But I quote Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president,
with a great line in which he says,
"Things have happened so fast.
We haven't yet had time to be astonished."
So I would say, look at the facts,
and you will be astonished.
Second, what will be the geostrategic challenge
the next 25 years?
The impact of the rise of China--
the impact of the rise of China--
on the US, on Americans' sense of their role in the world
and on the international order that the US built
in the wake of World War II and is underwritten
for seven decades since then--
seven decades, which, as the introduction reminded us,
have been without great power war, which is
in itself a historical anomaly.
So the strategic challenge going forward,
the impact of the rise of China on the US
and the international order.
And finally, on the question of whether the US and China
can escape Thucydides's trap or will find themselves dragged
to war, we need to remember that Thucydides's insight
about rising power versus ruling power is not--
let me say it again, not--
that the rising power thinks, I'm big and strong enough.
It's time for me to fight Evan.
And it's not that Evan looks at me and says,
this upstart is getting so strong that pretty soon he's
going to challenge me.
I should fight him now.
Instead, what happens is, during this dynamic,
a third-party action that's unintended by either
of the primary competitors that would otherwise
be inconsequential or easily managed leads one of them
to react and then the other.
And one thing leads to the other and a cascade,
at the end of which they find themselves in war.
And if we go to the Athens and Sparta story,
it's Corinth and Corcyra.
If we look at World War I, how in the world
could the assassination of an Archduke
have produced a conflagration that
was so devastating that it required historians
to create a whole new category?
That's why it's called World War I.
And in the current case, I would say the chief candidate
for this role is Kim Jong-un, who we're
going to see in the months immediately ahead
either acquire the ability to strike
San Francisco with a nuclear weapon,
or we're going to strike him to prevent that from happening.
So that's the tweet-sized version.
Just a little more and then I'll stop here.
Well, here's she and Obama talking
about Thucydides's trap.
Rise of China-- and for those of you haven't been following,
I have, I think, the best 20-page summary
of what's happened over the last 25 years in the China case.
And one of the illustrations I offer
is this bridge at Harvard, which Evan will remember.
It goes across the Charles River between the business
school and the Kennedy School.
I can see it looking out my office.
The discussion of the renovation of it
began when I was dean of the Kennedy School.
I quit being dean in 1989.
The project began in earnest in 2012.
It was a two-year project.
So the traffic has been horrible.
In 2014, they said, it's not finished.
It'll take another year.
In 2015, they said it's not finished.
It'll take another year.
In 2016, they said, we're not going to tell you
when it's going to be finished.
There's a bridge just like this in China in Beijing
called the Sanyuan Bridge, which actually it's 2 and 1/2 times
bigger than this in terms of traffic flow.
The Chinese decided in 2015 to renovate it.
How long did it take to complete?
How about a guess?
43 hours.
43 hours.
This is a YouTube.
You can go watch it.
Actual picture that's just sped it up,
and you could see the timeline.
43 hours.
If you look at high-speed rail, the US
has been building its single piece of high-speed rail
from San Francisco to Los Angeles for how long?
10 years.
When is it going to be finished?
Currently, they say 2029, but many people believe never.
In the past 10 years, how much high-speed rail
has China built that's running today?
16,000 miles.
16,000.
In the book, I give you a little checklist
that I do of when could China become
number one, 26 indicators?
Look at it.
You'll enjoy it.
Second question-- impact of the rise of China on the US.
And this is a cartoon that I made
for testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee
back in 2014 when a former student, who's
a member of the committee, asked me
if I would testify about the big picture.
So one way to think about what's happened with the rise of China
is to imagine a seesaw in a kid's schoolyard
with the US sitting on one end of the seesaw and China
sitting on the other end.
So in 2004, China's about 20% the size of the US.
In 2014, it's slightly larger--
equal or slightly larger.
On the current trend lines in 2024,
it's going to be 40% bigger than we are.
Say, whoa, wait a minute.
Nobody told me.
China's economy today is bigger than the US economy measured
by the single best yardstick for comparing national economies
in the judgment of the IMF and the CIA,
namely purchasing power parity.
That was the big takeaway from the 2014 IMF World Bank
Meeting.
It has not sunk in on Americans.
You will not read this in the Chicago paper or the New York
paper or the Boston paper or the Wall Street Journal.
So the impact of the rise of China everywhere--
if you haven't seen China in your face and in your space,
crowding you, you either haven't been looking,
or you should just wait a minute.
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: The committee
meets today to consider the nomination of General James
Mattis to be the Secretary of Defense of the United States.
I thank both Senator [INAUDIBLE] and Senator Cohen
for being here.
SECRETARY WILLIAM COHEN: He's probably the only one
here at this table who can hear the words, Thucydides's trap,
and not have to go to Wikipedia.
SENATOR ROGER WICKER: Of course, Secretary Cohen
has insulted every member of this committee
by suggesting that we don't readily understand that.
GENERAL JAMES MATTIS: We're going
to have to manage that competition between us
and China.
There is another piece of wisdom from antiquity
that says, "Fear, honor, and interest always
seem to be the root causes of why a nation chooses
to go to hostilities."
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Mattis, who's also
a big reader of Thucydides--
that's another line from Thucydides.
So the another one that I give you
is an epic graph to one of the chapters.
So I'm only focusing on one big idea in Thucydides.
There are a lot of big ideas there.
Actually, I have an epigraph from Thucydides
at the beginning of each one of the chapters just
to try to whet your appetite
So finally, we get to North Korea just for one second,
and we'll stop here.
So at the Mar-a-Lago Summit between Trump and Xi in April,
Trump said to him, "North Korea is
the test of our relationship.
You can solve this problem.
But if you don't solve this problem,
I will solve this problem.
And you won't like the way I do it."
And then he served him chocolate cake at the opening dinner,
excused himself, went to the room next door,
and announced that the US was launching 59 cruise
missiles against Syria to punish Assad
for the use of chemical weapons and just
to underline the message.
So there's no question whatever that Trump can order a cruise
missile attack on North Korean ICBM launch pads
to prevent them completing the ICBM tests,
which if they complete, will give the capability
to strike Los Angeles or San Francisco with nuclear weapons.
So that's a fact.
The question is, what comes next?
And when that question has been addressed
on multiple previous occasions in the US government.
When Evan was in the government, when
I was in the Clinton administration,
we looked at this very carefully.
The overwhelming estimate of the intelligence community
is that North Korea will respond by attacking Seoul,
the capital of South Korea, where there's
about 20 million people, including
200,000 Americans, who live.
And they can kill hundreds of thousands of people
overnight with artillery shells.
And then we respond by suppressing those attacks.
Otherwise, they'll kill more.
And then, if we go over after all the targets
that can attack South Korea, that's
a couple of thousand [INAUDIBLE]..
So then, that's the second Korean War.
And how the first Korean War work out?
I would say, go read about it.
In that case, North Korea dragged China and the US
into a war with each other that neither wanted.
50,000 Americans died, most of them killed by Chinese.
And a million Chinese died, most of them
killed by Americans, and several million Koreans.
So could Kim Jong-un drag US and China into a war?
Well, excuse me, the Kim regime already did once.
So could this happen again?
And I would say, I hope not.
I pray not, but it could.
So maybe that's enough to get us started.
Great, well thanks, Graham.
And welcome to Chicago.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Thank you.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Two things at the top-- first,
I want to thank the Institute of Politics.
We always enjoy working jointly, the Paulson Institute
and our next door neighbors actually over on Woodlawn
Avenue.
So terrific to do a program with you again.
Second, a real pleasure to do this
with Graham, who, as he said, if I may return the compliment,
we've known each other a long time.
In fact, you knew me when--
I think we first met in the mid-1990s
when I was a newly minted PhD doing a post-doc at Harvard.
The world was a lot different then.
So we've traveled a long way, but so has the world,
as Graham implied in his talk.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: At least I had the good fortune
to recognize talent.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, so we're going to have a little bit
of a conversation up here.
And then after a bit, I'll open it up,
and we want to get you involved too.
I was thinking maybe we could start--
there's a lot of different ways we could go on this.
But maybe, let's start by talking
about China a little bit.
So, like you, my background is mainly
geopolitics, national security.
And you're making essentially a geopolitical argument
about a geopolitical trap.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Right.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: And so, given my background, when
I hear about a geopolitical trap, I get all excited
and bothered by that.
But these days, I run an institute here
on campus that's mainly focused on economics
and political economy where we look
at China through the prism, not of a geopolitical trap,
but of actually a very different trap,
the so-called middle income trap.
And the World Bank did a study a few years ago
that showed that, in 1960, about 101 countries had
achieved middle-income status.
But by 2008, only 13 of them had managed
to transcend middle-income status
and become high-income countries.
And one of those 13 was Greece, which is not looking so good
these days.
All right, so the bottom line is,
if you look at the story of economics and not
just geopolitics over the last half century or so,
it's clear that, for a lot of countries including
but not limited to China, escaping the middle-income trap
can introduce all kinds of contradictions
into your development process.
It's a drag on growth.
It's a drag on income inequality.
It's a drag on your development.
And for economists looking at China,
this is a big obsession these days.
And so, that being the case, it really
begins to get to the question of what
happens if China can't get through that
and what kind of China we're dealing with
and the relationship between what's happening domestically
in China and some of these geopolitical effects.
Now I hear two arguments a lot these days,
which are flatly contradictory of each other.
One is that China has all these internal problems.
It's beset by contradictions and development challenges.
And therefore, it will be necessarily focused internally
on solving these many problems.
It can't deal with all these external challenges.
And so the argument is not quite, don't worry about China.
But let's face it-- in the great scheme of its priorities,
whether it's Xi Jinping or the next leader,
China is going to have to focus internally on its problems.
And that will mitigate and have a tempering effect
on Chinese behavior externally.
I think that people, especially in Washington,
who advance precisely the opposite argument--
kind of a version of the diversionary war argument--
that, amid all these internal contradictions and challenges,
China's leaders will want to distract the public
with bright shiny objects of nationalism and foreign policy
adventures.
Now you can run that argument either way,
but either way, it gets at this question of what kind of China
we're dealing with.
And China, as you know, sometimes we hear the story,
it's going to collapse by next Tuesday.
Other times, we hear it's going to be the great juggernaut,
the next power.
It's going to supplant the United States.
The story is more complex, but I'm wondering--
talk a little bit about what kind of China
we're dealing with and whether and how internal contradictions
can shape or not that kind of external behavior
that we're likely to see from China.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: OK, thank you.
I mean, that's a spectacular question and actually--
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: The two traps.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: --you're in a better position
to think deeply about this than I am.
So let me do one more shout out for Evan and also
the institute.
So you all have a fantastic resource here.
I don't quite know how the Institute of Politics
and the University of Chicago and the Paulson Institute
interact.
But there's no better place in the country
to focus on the questions of the real realities
about the economics and finance of China than the work
that Evan and Hank Paulson and group are doing.
So I read it with great interest.
And I think the special benefit of it,
relative to most of the other academic competitors,
is it's by people who actually have been
in the middle of government, who've talked to people, who've
engaged with their Chinese counterparts,
and therefore have informed judgment of a different sort
than just doing an abstract macro analysis.
I am familiar with the middle-income trap.
And I'm familiar with the World Bank study.
I have this argument with my colleague, Larry Summers,
who he and I co-chair China Working Group at the Belfer
Center.
And Larry has been bearish about China for a decade.
Every year, we make a bet.
And I've been bullish about China for a decade.
I've won all the bets so far.
So I think it comes down to a question
about the competence of the government,
if I were taking it as a--
just to be brief about it.
And the competence that's been displayed
by the Chinese government in coping
with the challenges they face has been, to me,
quite impressive.
And I have the benefit of having some insight about this
from a fellow who's Xi Jinping's chief economic advisor, whom
you know, Liu He, who was a student of mine
20 years ago at the Kennedy School.
And he can describe, as I say in the book,
he says, we have 17 insurmountable problems.
That was at least the last time I had seen him
when I'm writing in the book.
And he describes each one of them
in greater depth than any analysis
I've seen by Westerners of it.
And then he smiles and says, we're going to overcome them.
So they get up in the morning thinking
they have insurmountable problems,
and that's what they're trying to work on.
Now you and I know that we look at the history of these things
and think, wait a minute and especially
in the case of China.
I mean, Singapore-- well, at least
they're trying to deal with six million people.
And they managed this extremely well.
And Xi Jinping imagines he can be like Lee Kuan Yew.
So that's his hope and aspiration.
But how about with 1.4 billion people
and with all the complexity, I think, you know, uncertain.
But if I were betting it, it was improbable
that they could have sustained the rate of growth
they have for 10 years.
And then it was improbable for the second 10 years.
And it was improbable for the next 10 years.
We know for sure--
was it the Herb Stein law--
a trend that cannot continue forever won't.
But I did the Allison footnote to that,
which is that it's much easier to predict that something
will happen then when.
So I go to the doctor, and he says, "Graham,
you're going to die."
I say, "I got that already.
Now, when?
When?"
That's what's interesting.
So who knows?
I wouldn't bet against it though.
The second thing I'd say, which I say
in the conclusion of the book--
Evan will remember.
In the course that I teach at the Kennedy School,
I have a kind of a crazy idea about what
I call the Martian strategists.
So it's a way of trying to get outside of our own skin
looking down on what's going on here on planet Earth.
And in my picture, this is a lady, a strategist [INAUDIBLE]..
Let's just imagine she parachuted into Mar-a-lago
with Trump.
And I think she would say to them, you each have-- each,
each--
have an almost insurmountable problem
that, if you fail to address successfully,
the rest is not going to matter very much.
That's a prerequisite to whatever else you want to do.
And it's right inside your own border.
And the question for each of you is, are you
able to govern yourself?
And she would say, looking at the record the last 10 or 20
years, I doubt it.
One of you's got a dysfunctional democracy
that's going to be consumed by its own.
And the other one is trying to retro-fit
an authoritarian system that's an operating system that is
Lee Kuan Yew told Xi Jinping.
You can't sustain in a world in which people have smart phones.
It just doesn't work.
So I would say it's a big, big governance challenge
in both places, huge for China.
But I would say huge for us too.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: But from a strategic planning perspective,
you'd say we, the United States, have got to presume that,
even if we don't know the timeline,
and even if we presume there are bumps in the road, that
between point A and point B, we're
going to face the kind of challenge
that you're arguing about.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: I would say that the baseline projection
that I would propose we plan against
is a China that continues growing about three
times the rate we do.
And you can then run that out, and it
doesn't matter whether it's 10 years or 15 or 20
and that they are eager, not only
a China that will be bigger and stronger financially,
but that aspires, as Xi Jinping is quite clear,
to become predominant in its neighborhood.
On the other hand, and I think your point is
just right about this, and geopolitical arguments
go back and forth, suppose that the Chinese economy
began to not perform.
So now you revise it to Xi Jinping,
and your legitimacy is built on his new accommodation, which
is we deliver the goods, economic growth,
but also a very significant revival of nationalism built
on national pride that we're finding
standing up and re-establishing our established place.
So if you were not able to stand on the first leg,
the temptation to stand on the second leg would get larger.
So there's dangers in that option, I think, as well.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: So what are some of the mitigating factors?
I was looking at the book.
I think-- I don't remember all of the cases exactly,
but I think most of the non-war cases
are clustered toward the 20th century.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: The two biggies that are mostly--
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: All right, US, Soviet Union.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: --by the US Soviet Union in the Cold War
and the rise of US displacing Britain at the beginning
of the 20th century.
So that's pre-nuclear.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Right, it was pre-nuclear.
Right, but they tend to cluster at the more modern end
of the spectrum, which gets at the question
of whether something's happening in terms
of the evolution of international history.
So China, you know, one factor could be nuclear weapons.
China has had nuclear weapons since 1964, vastly predating
the economic rise in the country.
The demise of an emphasis on colonial empires,
ideologies of empire, to scramble
for overseas possessions.
How should we think about some of the structural factors that
might be changing internationally
that would mitigate some of these intrinsic competitive
dynamics?
And how much do nuclear weapons matter, the fact
that the US and China have them targeted at each other?
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Fortunately, for all of his economics,
Evan hasn't gotten away from his origin.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Yeah, I love the nukes.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: I appreciate and applaud that.
So when I tried to do an analysis of this sort,
and I talk a little bit about this in the conclusion,
I say start with the structural realities.
Identify as best you can the objective structural realities
and the trend lines.
So there's three big mitigating factors as I see it.
First, there's nuclear weapons.
China and the US now have reached
levels of arsenals that establish
mutual-assured destruction.
What that means is that, if we do our best to disarm them,
they can still destroy us.
So therefore, anybody who goes into either leader and
says, "I have a good idea.
Why don't we have a nuclear war with the other,"
knows that they'll be dismissed to the asylum as being insane.
That's committing suicide for your nation.
So that's a big, big, big bedrock.
That doesn't mean risks can't be taken.
That doesn't mean the Cuban Missile
Crisis didn't happen where there was one in three
chance of a nuclear war.
So it's not a 100% guarantee, but it's
a big, big [INAUDIBLE] factor.
Secondly, the US and China have got their economies
so entangled and intertwined that, if there were a war,
Wal-Marts would be empty.
And Chinese factories would be producing stuff for nobody.
And we couldn't get a loan to cover our deficit.
So I think, you look at that situation,
you say, wait a minute.
That's a high degree of economic interpenetration
and interdependence.
We should also remember, just on the other side,
that, prior to World War I, Britain and Germany were
very thickly woven together--
so thickly that somebody wrote the best seller in Europe
for the decade before World War I
was Norman Angell's famous book, The Great Illusion, which said,
there can't be war anymore because the winner
will lose more than the loser.
So war is not profitable, so people won't fight wars.
That didn't turn out to be right.
Thirdly, there's climate.
And while that's not a unanimous view in the US [INAUDIBLE],,
I think everybody who's looked at the evidence
sees that, if we just keep emitting
greenhouse gases the way we've been doing,
we're going to have an uninhabitable environment
in 100 years or sooner.
And if China were to do the same the same.
So neither of us can solve this problem.
So get three big big areas of serious joint-shared vital
interests.
So that ought to provide a framework
within which then to cope with the minor other elements
like North Korea.
So I would say that that would be the elements from what
you would hope, and structurally you
could construct a way of then coping with the asides.
I think now the asides are first that China very understandably,
as a rising power that gets bigger and stronger,
finds it anomalous that the US is the dominant power
in Western Asia.
So great powers historically are uncomfortable
with foreign powers on their borders and the adjacent seas.
I have a great chapter in the book on if Xi's China were just
like us, which Americans have found somewhat uncomfortable.
So this reads the rise of the US through the eyes
of Teddy Roosevelt in the period after 1897
when he went to Washington to become the number two
person in the Navy.
And it's a pretty amazing story.
In the decade that followed, the US
seized on a mysterious explosion in Havana Harbor
to declare war on Spain and liberate Cuba,
take Puerto Rico.
That's how Puerto Rico became part of the US--
and Guam-- that's how Guam--
to sponsor and support a coup in Colombia
to create a whole new country.
Panama, which the next day gave us
our contract for a canal so Teddy's ships could
move between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Threatened war first with Germany, then
with Britain, unless they butted out
of a territorial dispute in Venezuela.
And then actually stole the largest part
of the fat tail of Alaska, the strip of land that cuts off
Canada from the sea for about 600 miles running
from Alaska down to Juneau.
And then announced the Roosevelt corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine, which said,
if any country behaves in ways we don't like,
we send the Marines and change the government.
And every year that followed for the next decade,
we sent the Marines somewhere and change the government.
So Xi is kind of mild as compared to that so far.
So a rising power looks out and says,
it's strange you guys are there.
In fact, in the book, as you know,
Evan, I say what a Chinese PLA Navy guy told me.
He said, you know, China sees China seas.
He says, what's the name of this body of water next to us here?
It's called South China Sea.
This other one-- what's that called on your own map?
It's called East China Sea.
So why the US Navy is the arbiter of events in the South
China Sea tells who could build an island
or who owns an island?
Why should you have an opinion about this?
And it's very reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt.
It's like, what the hell are the Spanish doing in Cuba?
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Of course, the Filipinos
call it the West Philippines.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: There are a few other people
that have a different name.
But on our official US Navy map, [INAUDIBLE] map,
it says South China Sea, East China Sea.
And the Chinese think that may be their sea.
So I think that's an area inevitably
in which you're going to see people bumping up
against each other.
And the other, as I say, these third-party actions
like North Korea, where I was in Beijing about seven weeks ago
because the people in China are extremely
interested in the Thucydidean trap issue.
And talking to somebody about it, I said, look,
my theory is that if we just had adults to sit down and talk
privately, we could find a way to deal
with the North Korean problem.
And so I said, for example--
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: The US and China, not the US
and North Korea.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: US and China.
I said, so let's just say, if we were talking completely
privately-- this is a person who talks to Xi sometimes.
He said, OK, well, I'll tell you the truth.
There'd be no problem on the Korean peninsula
if you weren't there.
And I said, well, OK.
I'd ask you how can we solve this problem,
but I hadn't thought about that.
How do you make that?
He says, if you were here, there would be a unified Korea.
It would be a tributary of China.
We would never allow it to have nuclear weapons no more
than we would let Vietnam have nuclear weapons or Myanmar.
I mean, you know, we just tell them, forget about it.
So I said, well, let me tell you my narrative.
We didn't volunteer to be in Korea.
We came there to rescue South Korea
after North Korea, your ally, attacked them.
And then we beat them back up the peninsula.
Maybe we overdid it by getting close to your border.
You came in the door.
We ended with an armistice.
But since that armistice 60 years ago,
South Korea is one of the most successful countries
in the world.
It's a democracy, a vibrant country, 13th largest economy.
So we're proud of South Korea as kind of almost a poster
child of the Asian order that the Americans created.
And we're not going anywhere.
And he said, well, there's the problem.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: So I've heard that Chinese narrative too.
So here's what's missing from that Chinese narrative
among other things.
Koreans, right, which gets at another aspect
of this issue of constraint.
When I look at China's neighborhood,
you know, you've got India on one border, which is also
a large continental size country that's
going to be a top five global economy
sometime in the next 15, 20 years
with its own nuclear weapons, moving
toward the next generation nuclear deterrent
and the delivery systems associated with that.
You've got Japan, a latent nuclear power,
the world's third largest economy, big industrial power,
high-tech power.
You've got South Korea, and you've
got North Korea, both of which share
a commitment to 500 years of Korean nationalism each
in their way.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: In their own way.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: In their own way, and the North Koreans,
in fact, manipulate Korean nationalism
and their narrative of fighting Japan for their own ends.
You've got Vietnam.
You have this network of middle powers, latent great powers,
in Japan's case an actual economic great power
and a latent military great power, latent
nuclear capabilities.
So quite apart from the US-China story,
you have this Asian drama that includes
all of these other players.
Why is that not a constraint on China's aspirations
in the first instance but on US-China
competition in a second?
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, it's fantastic.
And so I would just say yes.
All those are additional structural realities for China.
I think that, for a while--
I mean, you and I can remember conversations with Chinese 20
years ago in which they would say, never
do we have any aspirations to do anything other
than just become a little less poor.
We're just a developing country minding our own business.
Hide and bide became a kind of umbrella for this.
Then they said, well, how about peaceful rise?
So all we're doing is just trying to become
a little more wealthy.
And in those conversations, people
would often say, because we would say,
you should be appreciative.
I've given this speech before.
I have to smile now that I think about it [INAUDIBLE]..
But you should be appreciative of what
we are doing for you, China, because otherwise, South Korea
would probably have nuclear weapons.
I mean, they were trying to get nuclear weapons at one stage.
And the US said choose between having nuclear weapons
and having American troops.
And if South Korea became a nuclear weapon state,
Japan would become nuclear weapon state.
And so now you've got China and India,
and South Korea and Japan.
You're going to have a nuclear contest in the region.
And that could become very unstable for you.
So we're doing you a favor for that.
I would say for a while some Chinese strategist said,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think now they say no, no, no.
That was then.
Now is now.
We can cope with this problem now.
We understand that we're not going
to be like you in your hemisphere where you
didn't have any competitors.
So we do have a serious competitor in Japan.
There's no love lost there.
We know that we've always had a lot of problems
with South Korea and with Vietnam
especially and with Korea, all of Korea [INAUDIBLE]..
I think India-- they continue to believe will not really make
it--
it will always be the land of the future.
So I think, for us--
when my colleague Ash Carter, who
I've recruited to be my successor at the Belfer Center
now-- so Ash likes to say, the Asians love us.
When we go to Asia, they all say, oh, we're
so happy to see you.
We need you to be here.
And I said, Ash, why not?
They think were defending them.
Why shouldn't they be happy to have somebody defend them
against somebody who's big and dangerous?
The question is-- ties of alliance
run in both directions, and actually how
Sparta and Athens got dragged into war
is their ally dragged them in.
World War I is allies dragging people along.
So I think this may actually be more dangerous for us
as we try to figure out how to fashion
an environment for China.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Let's get you guys involved.
I want to take a bunch from students first.
And to give you a lot of different ideas
to play with, let's take three at once.
So we have three students out there?
OK, one in back, one here, and then one here.
So let's-- go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you so much for being here, both of you,
for the wonderful talks.
I'm a student the Harris Public Policy School.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Great.
AUDIENCE: My question is about--
I noticed there's a new company called
Jigsaw, which is actually underneath the Google umbrella.
And the CEO and founder of it came from the state department.
And what it does is it tracks cyber attacks
from other countries around the world.
It combats oppression of freedom of speech and so forth.
So the way I see it, it's sort of opening the door
to privatization of US policy planning
in terms of global geopolitics.
So do you think that that will expand?
And if so, how might that play out?
Mainly, do you think that looks bad?
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: OK, before you answer,
let's get two more on the table.
There was one back here.
Yeah, please.
AUDIENCE: So the conversation of the possible confrontation
of China and the United States seems
to be framed in hard material terms--
economic, military, possible confrontation--
but I'd like to get your thoughts
on the role of soft power and culture and ideas
and popular culture in this conversation.
There was an article in foreign policy earlier this year
called, Why is China So Uncool?
And it gets to the effect that, as China is trying to seemingly
manufacture its soft power capabilities abroad,
and there are still all those deep-seeded contradictions that
you mentioned earlier--
like the Confucius Institute's cover
seems to be that they have very effective
and in the recent Cambridge University press
controversy that kind of speaks to
the deep-seeded contradictions.
So I'd like to get your thought on that.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: OK, and one more here.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
My name is [INAUDIBLE].
I'm also a first-year student at Harris School of Public Policy.
My question-- so we were talking about
joint-shared vital interest that China and the US have.
I'm just wondering, how [? big ?]
the economic interdependence is going
to make the war more costly for both countries.
Also, because there is this term that I've heard recently.
It's called hot economics and cold politics.
I'm just wondering how true this statement is.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Say it again.
AUDIENCE: It's hot economics and cold politics.
Thank you.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: All right.
Great questions.
I will do justice to the questions,
but I will try to at least respond briefly.
First, on the private sector of Google Jigsaw at all,
as well as in the Chinese case, let's
take [INAUDIBLE] or Alibaba and the governments.
The relationships between those are thicker
than you would understand from reading in the newspapers
and inevitably so.
And there will be many companies that
are trying to track cyber attacks because cyber attacks
have big impact on companies.
And the government is not able to defend them successfully.
And so, if you're any one of the companies that
have been hacked lately or anyone like them,
you're interested in all the protection that you can get.
So I would say this whole space is moving rapidly.
I think, in particular, in the Chinese case,
the entities that are involved in both offensive and defensive
cyber activity have always lived in a big gray zone.
But there's actually a little more gray
in the American picture than usually meets the eye.
On the soft power and ideas, which
may relate to the hard economic sense of power, I think,
as one of my Chinese friends says,
I would be happy to have a contest between hard power
and soft power any day.
So tell me how your soft power prevented
Russia taking over Ukraine or achieved your objectives
in Syria.
So another version of this would say, look, if we can be feared
and then if we can be respected, we don't have to be loved.
So the current version of this--
Eric Lee, I think, is one of the interesting people
to read on the subject.
He basically says, if we show that we're
competent to perform, so we can fix a bridge,
and you spend however long fixing a bridge,
and we can show we can grow an economy a lot faster than you
can.
And we have a government that's not all the time tangled up
the way your government is.
I mean, we don't have Donald Trump as the head of China.
We don't have a government or a Congress or Parliament
that can't pass laws and don't even have a budget.
He said, people will look and say,
if they've got a system for driving
the bus, that looks like a pretty good system for me,
or good enough.
So if we're going to run into people doing emulation--
Now I don't agree with this.
I'm an old-fashioned, small-L, Western liberal,
but that's a set of beliefs I've got with it.
But I think the evidence, at this stage,
would be at least an argument.
And that's the same thing on the hard economics, soft power.
If you look at the game over the last 20 years
in the South China Sea and ASEAN and you ask--
I have a little bit of description
of this in the end of the first chapter
from a Rip Van Winkle moment that a great American diplomat
who's a friend of both Evan's and mine, who's now deceased,
Steve Bosworth.
So 20 years ago, there would be no question, whatever,
if anything happened in the region of first capital
folks in Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines or Vietnam
or even Singapore would against the US,
Washington-- first place they would call.
He said, when he arrived in Asia after about an eight-year
hiatus-- he's of Asian hand--
in 2009, when he became Obama's special emissary
for North Korea, he went and visited all the regions.
And he came back, and he said he had
been shocked that now the first place they look every day
is in Beijing.
The first question they ask is for Beijing.
So they may not love China, but if it's its number one
market, their number one importer, their number one
investor, and they've shown and demonstrated
willingness to squeeze people when they behave in ways
they don't like, they can get their way--
maybe grudgingly, but get their way.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: All right.
Let's take a couple more.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm a first-year in the college, and I kind of just want
to ask--
you talked earlier about complex interdependence theory, what
was proposed by Joseph Nye.
Do you think that that will come into play
China reaches an extent where its economic and perhaps
military capacity meets that of the US,
will it try to challenge the smaller kind of focal points
in which a war could begin, like the fact
that the US holds a lot of the choke points for trade
into China and smaller areas where people might not
think a war would begin but where aggression
can start and be ignited?
AUDIENCE: I'm from Harris's Public Policy.
And my question about Thucydides's trap is--
I'm from the higher education policy background.
So it's new to me.
But I'm very curious.
So from my understanding, the prerequisite for this trap
to stand is, number one, all the nations, it is natural for them
to survive and to expand.
Number two, they're competing for the same types of resources
to achieve this goal.
Number three, these resources are not
reproducible or renewable.
And number four, the internal conflict
will not impede or constrain or deter
the expansion of this country.
So based on these four--
I don't know if they're right because I'm
fairly new to this area.
But my question is, so when you review
these four assumptions for this trap to stand,
so is China the country of the expansive nature and capacity?
Number two, what are the resources that China and the US
are competing for when they grow?
Number three, are these resources
really not reproducible or renewable?
The fourth one you already touched upon is--
how big will be a constraint that the internal conflicts
that these two countries have on their expansion capacities?
It's a very long question.
[INAUDIBLE] It's just my curiosity.
Thank you.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: Let me do the two quickly.
I'll start with the second one and go back.
So it's a very good question.
In the book, I look at 16 cases, not including
Thucydides's case-- so 16 cases in the last 500 years.
It turns out there's no silver bullet or single variable.
Your attempt to try to have four items are worth doing,
and you could run those across all 16 cases
and see whether, in some instances,
there's more of this.
There's more of that.
Every case has its own nuances.
Every case is different, but in every instance,
I think you'll find the case in which you'll
get a check by all those boxes, and you get to war.
And you also get a check by all those boxes,
and you don't get to war.
So it was more complicated than that.
And I think, in particular, while it's worth
starting with the structural realities
that the US simply in its own narrow, selfish, vital,
national interest requires not having a war with China.
And China, in its own national, selfish interest,
has not having a war with us.
So this would be a catastrophic outcome for both.
So [INAUDIBLE] would say, well, then war can't happen.
And that would only be because you hadn't looked at history.
So in the case of World War I, what
happened to the aspirations of every one
of the principal actors?
So the Austro-Hungarian emperor was trying
to hold together his empire.
It was dissolved, and he was gone.
Russian czar was trying to support the Serbs.
He'd been overthrown his whole regime
by the Bolsheviks and [INAUDIBLE]..
The Kaiser in Germany is backing his buddy in Vienna.
He's gone, out.
French, our military allied with Russia--
they are bled of their youth for a whole generation.
Society never recovers.
And Britain, which has been a creditor for 100 years,
is turned into a debtor.
And it's on a slow slide to decline.
So at the end of the war, if you'd given people
a chance for a do-over, no one of the leaders
would have chosen what he did.
But they did, and this happened.
So I would say it's worth looking
at the areas for the reasons why this would be crazy.
It's worth reminding ourselves that this would be crazy.
I mean, the purpose of this book is not about fatalism,
and it's not about pessimism.
I would say it's not to predict the future but to prevent it.
So this is a book about how to prevent
falling into Thucydides's trap.
But I think Xi Jinping's line about the challenge
is only how to escape Thucydides's trap.
And I think that requires thinking about the danger
and then thinking about ways in which countries
like North Korea could drag us somewhere
where we don't want to go.
On the first question, complex interdependence-- that's
a complicated question and a good question.
So complex interdependence is an important idea.
But there's a temptation to think of interdependence
as if it was symmetrical.
And Joe often portrays it as symmetrical.
I'm very much more interested in asymmetrical interdependence.
So if I think about the interdependence
between the drug dealer and the addict, I mean,
if I don't have an addict, I don't have anybody
to sell my drugs to.
But if you don't buy your drugs, you have a bigger problem
than that.
So if I watch--
the theory of the case has been for some time,
and I think it's still not settled,
but I would say it's pretty close to settled--
that as China became more entangled
in the international system, the rule-based international system
that the US had built, it would become more like us
and would then become a more responsible stakeholder
as our colleague Bob Zoellick put it.
Well, that's one possibility, but the other possibility
is that I become more entangled in your system.
I demand more say and sway about my influence in the system
relative to yours.
And a very good case to study in this instance
is concessional loans to developing countries
and the World Bank.
So when the World Bank, which was created by the US
after World War II and which has played a very important role,
it was for a long time the principal source
of loans for developing countries.
China wanted a bigger say in the World Bank.
USS resisted China having a bigger say.
China created most recently this Asian infrastructure
development bank.
Today Chinese concessional loans to developing countries
is four times larger--
just Chinese loans-- then the World Bank.
And if you look at the IMF, this is
another amazing and interesting story,
which still hasn't been told, but where,
as the US attempts to continue to hold our position,
which we wrote into the circumstances
when we created the IMF, is basically
having a unilateral veto.
China is finding that uncomfortable
and is moving to see what other arrangements are possible.
So I would say that complex interdependence can either
be that as I become more interdependent
I become more "responsible." as you would think of it.
Or alternatively, I have more leverage.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Well, on that cheery note,
what is a famous line from--
[INAUDIBLE] had that line about, after World War I,
they said what were the causes of war?
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: He said a famous line, which I
use several times in the book.
So this is the end of World War I. This crazy thing has
happened in Europe, which has been the center
piece of civilization for 1,000 years, has come crashing down.
So they asked one of the principal leaders.
It would have been the prime minister in effect in Germany.
How did this happen?
And he says, "If we only knew."
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: So there you go.
Well, we're so delighted you came to Chicago.
There are a lot more questions, so if you
have a couple of minutes, maybe you
can stick around and talk to a couple of people.
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON: And I think they have some books
outside if you're interested.
If you read the book and you like it or don't like it--
both, I think--
I'm interested in reactions to it.
So I would say send me an email, and I
will be interested to see.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: All right, great.
Well, please join me in thanking Graham.
[APPLAUSE]
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