Fear of being number two

There is a small but significant industry in the United States that predicts the “coming war” with China and Atlantic Magazine is foremost among reputable American monthlies in giving a home to such speculation. It has just done it again in an article that includes a hearty dose of geopolitical theory. The theory is “The Thucydides Trap”.

The author is Graham Allison of Harvard University, the man who coined that phrase. Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC, explained what caused the confl ict this way: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” It lasted 20 years and, at the end of it, the two great powers of the ancient Greek world were both devastated.

Yet they didn’t really go to war over anything in particular, according to Thucydides. The problem was that Athens was overtaking Sparta in power ( like China is overtaking the US) and just that one fact was enough to send them to war. So are China and the US doomed to go to war in the next decade?

Allison knows better than to make a prediction, but he does point out that out of the past 16 cases when one major power was gaining in power and its rival feared relegation to the second rank, 12 ended in war.

Does it really matter who’s more powerful when China and the US have no shared border, make no territorial claims against each other and are separated by the world’s largest ocean?

Lots of people in each country would say no, but both countries have military-industrial-academic complexes that thrive on the threat of a US-Chinese military conflict.

They wouldn’t benefit from an actual war, of course. But the threat of a great war kept millions of people in the military, in defence industries and in various universities and think tanks in sometimes very profitable work during the four decades of the US-Soviet Cold War.

The threat of a US-Chinese war already provides gainful employment to a lot of people. If the perceived threat of war grows, so will the number of American and Chinese experts who make a living from it.

So it’s worth examining Allison’s assumptions to see if they hold water.

There are only two key assumptions. One is that China will decisively surpass the US in national power in the coming decade. The other is that such transfers of power from one dominant nation to another are still likely to end in war. Neither is as certain as it seems.

Chinese dominance is certain if the country keeps growing economically even at its new, lower rate of 7% a year. That is still at least twice the US rate. But the era of 10% annual growth ended for Japan and South Korea, the other East Asian “miracles”, after about 30 years. Each country then fell to a normal industrialised country growth rate or, in Japan’s case, below it.

China is around the 30-year point now. Maybe its managers are cleverer and it can avoid the same fate, but their recent ham-fisted efforts to prop up the stock market suggest otherwise.

Most observers believe that China’s economic growth this year is already below 7% – perhaps 4% or even less. Neither of the other East Asian miracles ever got back onto the ultra-high growth track after they fell off it. At 4% growth or less, China would not be overtaking the US any time soon.

But a US-Chinese war is not inevitable. It may not even be likely.