Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR | SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2018 LIONEL GELBER PRIZE | NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: FINANCIAL TIMES * THE TIMES (LONDON) * AMAZON “Allison is one of the keenest observers of international affairs around.”— JOE BIDEN, former vice president of the United States China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, violence is the likeliest result. Over the past five hundred years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times; war broke out in twelve. 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. A trade conflict, cyberattack, Korean crisis, or accident at sea could easily spark a major war. In Destined for War, eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison masterfully blends history and current events to explain the timeless machinery of Thucydides’s Trap—and to explore the painful steps that might prevent disaster today. “[A] must-read book in both Washington and Beijing.”— NIALL FERGUSON, BOSTON GLOBE “[Allison is] a first-class academic with the instincts of a first-rate politician.”— BLOOMBERG NEWS “[Full of] wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history . . . [A] fine book.”— NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW