Summary: Historically in 12 out of 16 cases where there was a rapid shift in the relative power of a rising nation that threatened to displace a ruling state, the result was war.
It’s a good article but they seem to completely ignore the fact that none of their examples since the advent of Nuclear weapons have lead to wars, in fact their article doesn’t mention Nuclear weapons at all.
I certainly see that China is going to continue pushing for their own significant sphere of influence in Asia, doubling down on their military installations in the South China Sea and continuuing to expand their soft power influence via huge investments on mega projects in Africa / South America etc.
According to the article the US either accepts the change in status that its not the world’s sole super power, or we get a war. What says Great Debates? Personally I think that despite the aggressive posturing of all the Republican candidates, it’s all bluff. (Yes even Trump). Carrier groups will get sailed through the south china sea in a show of “freedom of the seas”, but China will keep the islands it already has and continue to slowly encroach.
Well, this is a bit of a different angle. The article I linked is concerned with the probability that a war is likely based on historical forces. I think there is room for a new discussion here.
It totally ignores the nuclear dimension. Wars between great powers when their interests collide traditionally have been inevitable. Thats why Rome fought Persia. England/Britain/UK fought SPain and France, the Ottomons fought the Hapsburgs
In the era of nuclear weapons, the paradigm has shifted. No longer can the perceived gain outweigh potential cost, the potential cost is “we are all dead half an hour from now”.
This does not mean the Great Power competition will not occur, only that direct conflict is an unlikely manifestation of it.
The biggest mistake we, the west, can make is to assume that all others think as we do. They do not, and we pay the price for that over and over again.
The current status quo in the west assumes war is a bad thing and always must be avoided no matter the situation. Even if the cost to stand down is more chaos, as we currently see in the mid-east. I am sure many in China do not think that at all. They look at the potential for war in and ask if the risk is worth the potential gain. When that question tips to yes, then watch out.
While China is certainly growing in influence and wealth, it is still a very long way from being a challenge to America’s global dominance. The US is in a strong position to rig the game in its favour and prevent any other nation from knocking it off the top spot.
That said, China is home to a sizeable fraction of the world’s population, it has been the dominant power throughout most of history. In the long run, it will likely regain that position and the last few centuries will be seen as something of an anomaly.
I suspect (hope) at that stage, all parties concerned will do everything possible to avoid all out war. World leaders and generals tend to prefer wars where they can send poor, uneducated people to do the actual fighting. No sane person wants to start a war which will almost certainly kill them, their families and everyone they know, whilst reducing their country to rubble. I could easily see a new cold war developing though.
The Chinese are mostly interested in doing business nowadays, and the U.S. is their biggest trading partner. They’ll do nothing to disrupt that arrangement, which war would.
How exactly do the inscrutable Chinese leaders believe that war will benefit them, when the United States has thousands of nuclear warheads?
And if we in the weak and decadent West think war can never be an option no matter the cost, what exactly were we doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya over the last decade? I believe you might call that “war”, and it wasn’t avoided. Three countries invaded and bombed and the government toppled in a decade isn’t exactly avoiding war at all costs.
Even without nuclear weapons, I think there wouldn’t be a war since:
China can’t invade mainland U.S., and the U.S. can’t invade (or at least can’t hold) mainland China.
The distance between the two countries would strongly favor the defender – if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost trillions, how much would a war with China cost?
Both economies are strongly linked – the war would make the last recession seem like a time of unlimited prosperity.
I don’t think there is an economic incentive for the war, so it wouldn’t happen. I don’t trust people’s basic decency, but I do trust their greed. Business interests in both the U.S. and China will be strongly opposed to the war, and will succeed in getting what they want. The only sector that might stand to win something from this war is the military-industrial complex. Yes, they are pretty powerful, but they are not omnipotent.
The Japanese government at the time was (1) dominated by a military-expansionist ideology and (2) land-hungry because it was painfully aware that the Home Islands could no longer grow enough food to feed the growing population. Neither of those factors apply in China today.
This assumes China will continue to rise as it has been, which I think is a bad assumption at this point. I don’t believe there has or will be a rapid shift in relative power, either…much more so than Germany verse the UK pre-WWI, both in economic as well as military (and all the other things that make for a hyper power today).
I don’t think we need Thucydides’s Trap or past examples to see that there is a possibility of conflict between the US and China. Most likely it would happen when/if China pushes one of it’s regional neighbors too hard and fighting breaks out, drawing the US into the conflict as well. Also, China obviously HAS miscalculated US response in the region…and also our tolerance for continual cyber attacks not only on our government (which is quasi-accepted, at least by the old rules of the game) but against our corporations BY the Chinese government with the intent of giving their own companies an advantage or R&D. That’s totally not kosher by the rules of the game.
Certainly, though you have to look a bit deeper. China has a lot of systemic internal issues and their people have been in a low grade protest against the government (nearly a rebellion at times) for years now. While China spends a lot on their military (over $200 billion) a lot of that money actually goes to China’s internal security forces to just keep a lid on things. They haven’t been very good at ‘soft power’ especially in their own neighborhood, alienating nearly every nation that has a border with them to the extent that many of them, not exactly friendly to the US, have started making overtures about closer ties with us…or have started to increase their own military spending.
The US is the worlds only hyper power, and we dwarf China in nearly every respect. This isn’t Rah Rah, USAUSAUSA!, this is fact. But really, the main point is that China seems on it’s surface to be unstoppable, but really they have feet of clay. I think in 10 years, 20 at the most people will look back at this time and wonder why we were all so panicked about China, and how we didn’t see the collapse of the CCP coming…in similar ways to how, 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union folks wondered what all the fuss was about or how we didn’t see it coming.
You say this as if only the Republicans are talking about China or ‘posturing’. It’s the Obama administration who has begun the plan of a pivot to Asia as well as pressing the Chinese on their islands, challenging their right to create fiat territories for themselves in disputed and international waters, their cyber attacks and all the rest. Here is a video on how American candidates (from both sides) use China in their campaigns…the best part is the segment on Trump saying ‘China’ over and over again.
I don’t think it’s a bluff (wrt what we are doing in the South China Sea), nor do I think it’s a useless gesture…nor is it inevitable that China gets the region. In fact, if we DON’T want to have that conflict you are asking about, we need to be firm on this and do what we are doing, which is demonstrating that this ISN’T Chinese territory and we don’t accept that them building some islands out of sand makes it Chinese territory by fiat.
It is exactly “Rah Rah Rah Rah, USAUSAUSA!” as the article points out, this thing …
Is no longer true.
Nor can China be compared with the USSR of the 1980’s in any respect. The USSR had suffered a well attested economic stagnation since about 1970, which had been mitigated to an extent by the Oil crises. The USSR suffered catasrophic reductions in standards of living in that time; which the Chinese have not, indeed their economic growth pulled about a billion people out of poverty
[QUOTE= Celidin]
Not to say that this is a direct parallel, but in 1941, Japan’s biggest trading partner was … the United States.
So–we haven’t invaded or bombed a country this year, and that makes us cowards? I mean, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was years ago, we’re completely different now!
Maybe you didn’t notice, but at the time of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the American people were perfectly fine with the arrangement. It’s only after a decade of inconclusive fighting and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted that we look back and wonder what was the point.
But, we haven’t been clamoring to send troops to Syria, so that means the Americans are pussies who avoid war at all costs.
It’s clear we don’t avoid war at all costs. We like war, we just like the cost to be small. We love war when the war has a low cost, and we grumble about wars that have a large cost. But just because after we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars and put hundreds of thousands of people in the grave and we realize that the war had a large cost and therefore we shouldn’t have asked for it, we still get involved in costly wars regularly.
Here’s an angle no one is considering: China’s population control policies have led them to a situation in which they have a large number of young males (and far fewer young females), most of whom are only children and, often, only grandchildren.
On ONE hand, a country with a huge number of young men who have no hope of finding women could easily turn to militarism.
On the other hand, will the millions of Chinese citizens with just one child (or one grandchild) be eager to send their only kids off to get killed in a war?
China’s demographics could make them much more warlike or much less!
You’re forgetting China’s proximity to South East Asia - which has 100’s of millions of women from poor rural families for whom marrying a comparatively better off Chinese husband is a good option. China also sends its young men off to its ‘colonies’, its vast infrastructure projects in Africa etc where they often marry locals as well.
You say this as if only the Republicans are talking about China or ‘posturing’. It’s the Obama administration who has begun the plan of a pivot to Asia as well as pressing the Chinese on their islands, challenging their right to create fiat territories for themselves in disputed and international waters, their cyber attacks and all the rest.