China’s rise will turn Thucydides Trap on its head

The end of the Cold War was supposed to deliver a long peace. For a while, that was working, until it wasn’t. We might now be entering another period when the breakdown of a world order leads to war.It was no accident that President Xi Jinping cited the “Thucydides Trap” during his summit in Beijing with his US counterpart Donald Trump, putting it forward as something for both superpowers to avoid. The theory, popularised by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, digs deep into an episode in ancient Greek history to warn against the danger of war between a rising power and a declining one.Meanwhile, more scholars – both Western and Chinese – are examining the Chinese tribute system and the peace it maintained in East Asia over several centuries. In “The Lessons of the Long Confucian Peace”, an essay in Foreign Affairs earlier this month, authors Michael J. Gigante, Joshua Stone, Daniel Druckman and Ming Wan argue that “from 1598 to 1894, most of East Asia – China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom (now part of Japan) and Vietnam – was largely devoid of internal fighting”.