Will China and America go to war?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Will the growing competition between China and the United States inevitably lead to military conflict?

One leading American academic created huge attention when in 2017 when he posed the idea of what he called a "Thucydides Trap". Drawing on the work of the ancient Greek historian, he warned that when a rising power (Sparta) threatens an existing power (Athens) they are destined to clash, unless both countries change their policies. He warned that the same pattern could play out with the US and China.

Since then, President Trump has engaged in combative rhetoric over trade, while China has fast been modernising and upgrading its military.

BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Jonathan Marcus considers whether Washington and Beijing can escape the trap, or whether the growing economic, strategic and technological rivalry between the two nations will inevitably end in conflict.

(Photo: US and Chinese freight containers crash into each other. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC World Service. I'm Jonathan Marcus and over the next half hour I'll be asking
0:08.7	are the US and China destined for war.
0:15.1	Not so long ago China's rise was seen as essentially benign.
0:19.2	A growing economy it was,
0:23.0	a liberalising political system.
0:25.0	China was, to use the phrase favoured by US experts, becoming a responsible global
0:30.0	stakeholder.
0:32.0	But over the last few years that has all changed. China is increasingly
0:36.7	seen as a threat. Indeed many fear that the rivalry between China and the United
0:41.3	States could ultimately even lead to war, a conflict that would affect everyone everywhere.
0:48.0	The whole relationship between Washington and Beijing is being reframed. The responsible stakeholder model is out, and a new paradigm
0:57.2	is in, one that harks back to the ancient classical world and the work of Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian war between
1:06.3	Athens and Sparta.
1:07.9	It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.
1:21.0	One expert has become highly influential by drawing on Thucydides work to analyze the contemporary
1:26.7	rivalry between the US and China.
1:29.7	Thucydides trap is the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace
1:36.9	a ruling power.
1:38.7	Professor Graham Allison of Harvard University's Belfer Center is a veteran scholar of international affairs. His
1:45.0	groundbreaking book, Destined for War, Can America and China Avoid Thucydides Trap,
1:50.4	has become required reading for policy makers, academics and journalists alike.
1:57.0	In my book I reviewed the last 500 years of history. In the last 500 years we've seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to
	...

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