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中、美是否終需一戰?
[轉載, 英文, 待板主老大翻譯吧]
Can America and China avoid going to war in the future?
Global politics is following a familiar pattern, as a ruling power feels the heat from a rising one
GRAHAM ALLISON
Less than three months after declaring that he had “great confidence” China would rein in North Korean belligerence, President Trump ranted on Twitter last week, “Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40 per cent in the first quarter. So much for China working with us — but we had to give it a try!” Losing patience with China, Trump may take unilateral, even military, action against North Korea’s nuclear programme. Could this escalate into a second Korean War?
In my new book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, I argue that on the current trajectory, war between the US and China in the decades ahead is much more likely than is currently recognised. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: a deadly pattern of structural stress that occurs when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon was first described by the Greek historian Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War, which devastated Ancient Greece. As he explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
The Applied History Project I direct at Harvard has found 16 cases in which a major nation’s rise has disrupted the position of a dominant state over the past 500 years. Twelve ended in war.
For a vivid example, consider what was happening 100 years ago. How could the assassination of an archduke ignite a conflagration so catastrophic that it required historians to create an entirely new category: world war? The answer is that the chronic tension caused by a rising power’s rivalry with a ruling power produces a deadly dynamic in which otherwise manageable events can trigger a cascade of actions and reactions that lead to results no one intended.
The fact that war was averted in four of the 16 cases means the outcome is not pre-ordained. The point of Thucydides’s Trap is neither fatalism nor pessimism. Instead, it should awaken us to recognise the extreme danger created by current conditions between the US and China. If both sides follow business as usual, we should expect history as usual.
The world has never seen anything like the rapid, tectonic shift in the global balance of power from the rise of China. The US accounted for 50 per cent of the global economic market in the years immediately after the Second World War. By 1980 that had declined to 22 per cent. Three decades of double-digit Chinese growth has reduced that US share to 16 per cent today. Meanwhile, China’s share of the global economy has soared from two per cent in 1980 to 18 per cent in 2016.
For many, the idea that China could challenge the US seems inconceivable. Indeed, the Western media’s leading story about the Chinese economy in recent years is “slowdown”, while its favorite adjective about US economic performance is “recovering”. But despite its “slowdown” China is growing three times faster than the US. In 2014 China surpassed the US to become the largest economy in the world, measured by purchasing power parity, which both the CIA and IMF agree is the best yardstick. If their current growth continues, China’s economy will be 50 per cent larger in 2023. By 2040 it will be three times larger. President Trump’s claims that the US has been “losing” to China reflect, in part, the reality of this shifting see-saw.
Can Trump and China’s Xi Jinping manage the most critical geopolitical relationship of the 21st century without going to war? As personalities, Trump and Xi could not be more different. But in many ways they are mirror images. Both have pledged to restore the greatness of their nations with an agenda of radical change. Everyone knows Trump’s trademark one-liner. But when Xi rose to power in 2012, he announced his own call to make China great again: his “China Dream” called for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
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