Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and C podcast. Today's episode, based on an internal lunch series

conversation, is moderated by A6 and Z policy team partner Matt Colford and is with the author of

the new book, Destined for War, Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? Their conversation

also touches very briefly on centers of creativity

and power, tech, North Korea, and finally, the role of applying history to our thinking about the

future. But first, more about the author. Political scientist Graham Ellison was dean of Harvard's

John F. Kennedy School of Government and is currently the director of the Harvard Belfar Center for Science and

International Affairs. He's been a mentor to innumerable senior government officials, including as

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans under President Clinton and special advisor to

the Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. He's also served as a member of the Defense Policy

Board for seven secretaries of defense, dating back to the Reagan administration.

In 1971, Graham wrote this essay, which was subsequently turned into a book called Essence of Decision, Explain the Cuban Missile Crisis, which remains one of, if not the most widely read, pieces in government among senior national security leaders.

So really, when you talk about people who have institutional knowledge,

particularly at the Defense Department, there's really nobody who equals Graham. We're really here

to talk about your new book, about the state of the U.S.-China relationship, particularly around

international security issues. Thanks for the kind introduction. So who was Thucydides? Why was he

important? And what is this so-called Thucydides trap?

Thucydides was a chronicler of the great conflict between Athens and Sparta in classical Greece.

He wrote a spectacular book called The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides captured in this book, an insight, which is essentially as old as a recorded history itself,

which is that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens.

So he says famously, in this quotation, it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this

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