www.belfercenter.org AP
Summer 2017
Graham Allison on Thucydides’s Trap
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将中国列为货币 操纵国为时已晚
hen a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound: extreme danger ahead. As the ancient Greek historian Thucydides explained in his history of the Peloponnesian War, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Today, an irresistible rising China is on course to collide with an immovable America. Identifying clues from history to prevent violent conflict between Washington and Beijing has been the focus of a five-year research project led by Belfer Center Director Graham Allison, culminating in the May 30 publication of his latest book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Allison’s research—the pioneer endeavor of the Belfer Center’s budding Applied History Project—uncovered a deadly pattern. Over the past 500 years, a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power 16 times. In 12 of those cases, the outcome ended in war. The fact that war was averted in four cases demonstrates that the outcome is not foreordained. But avoiding war between the United States and China will require statecraft as subtle as that of the British in dealing with a rising America a century ago, or the “wise men” who crafted a Cold War strategy to meet the Soviet Union’s surge without bombs and bullets.
continued on page 7
SEE INSIDE:
Samantha Power Returns
page 3
Graham Allison’s Transformative Tenure
page 4
Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN will lead new Center project
A look at 22 years as Director of the Belfer Center
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