I had initially shelved this book a bit lower on my To Read list then this trade war between China and US(the review is being written in September 2018) has escalated into a full scale war which necessitated an analysis on how close we might be to the "real" war. According to Graham Allison though the chance is low, the probability is non-zero. Reason? Thucydide's Trap.The trap with a name that I have no intention of pronouncing twice, occurs when a rising power deems the current dominant power

President says US will act unilaterally if China does not pressure Pyongyangin: https://www.ft.com/content/4d9f65d6-1...

The spectacular rise of China’s economic and military might in the past twenty years has given rise to hope as well as anxiety and fear among diplomats and policy makers in the United States. Even the academics and historians are intrigued by what it portends for the future. Consequently, we have a plethora of books, essays and analysis in the media and from the publishing houses. This book is one more contribution to the subject, but quite an original and interesting one. It focuses on the ques...

History shows that changes in the balance of power often occur gradually over time. The spectacular confirmation of the new order sometimes comes only after the fact, when it is punctuated by a decisive war or political collapse. This book argues that the reemergence of China will upend the post-Cold War order in which the United States has been the preeminent power internationally. In the picture that Allison paints, China will not just match the United States as a superpower but will utterly d...

This is a very cool concept and I was beyond excited to read it. It assumes that its audience is primarily from the United States, so provides little information on the country's government and history. In comparison, there are large amounts of background information on the Chinese government and history. Without providing the evidence to support their US-bias I find it difficult to trust the author's conclusions. The US bias implies that if war were to break out between the US and China, it wou...

Of the several books I've read this spring on the China-U. S. competition in the western Pacific, Destined for War vies with Christopher Coker's The Improbable War as being the most scholarly. Both rely heavily on history for their analysis of the present.All I've been reading refers to what's called the Thucydides Trap, the phenomenon existing when a ruling power is threatened with displacement by a rising power. The situation, which is how all these analysts view the current China-U. S. rivalr...

This was well-written and informative. A few takeaways:- China's growth can hardly be overstated. It's genuinely impressive, and unprecedented in terms of modern metrics.- Chinese folks, by and large, have a pretty pragmatic view of the world - democracy is not going to happen as long as the country is getting more prosperous under the CCP. If responsive autocracy is working, why fix it? In other words, hardly anyone is still talking about Tiananmen Square, now that China is on the path to growt...

This is Thucydides’ Paradox (from his towering work, The Peloponnesian Wars) and its implication for American-Chinese relations, as per Graham Allison: About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immova...

Graham Allison's "Destined for War" is an accessible book about one of the most important topics in current international affairs - the relations between the U.S. and China. However, I was actually a bit disappointed with the amount of new content and ideas in the book. The actual idea of a "Thucydides Trap" - where the rise of a new power and the relative decline of the ruling power creates so much stress in the inter-state system that war is likely to break out - was clearly put forth in Allis...

Read it as part of an EA reading club and really enjoyed it. The book is the result of a history research project which found that 12 out of 16 cases of a rising power threatening to displace ruling power in the end culminated into a war. In the book, Allison is working to extract lessons that help us avoid escalating tensions between US and China. Maybe because of this motivating purpose the historical analyses felt very alive and gripping to me. I think this approach to history works really we...

Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and sometime government functionary, is clearly a man who thinks a great deal of himself. On the other hand, most of his pride in himself actually seems justified by his experience and thought, and in these Trumpian days, perhaps immodesty is the Spirit of the Age. Therefore, if you can get through the scenes in “Destined For War” where Allison talks down to and instructs David Petraeus like a schoolboy, as the latter sits behind his CIA desk; and the passages...

By far the best review of Allison’s book by Sinologist Arthur Waldron - ouch!“How to conclude a look at so ill conceived and sloppily executed a book? Do not blame Allison. The problem is the pervasive lack of knowledge of China — a country which is, after all, run by the Communist Party, the police, and the army, and thus difficult to get to know. This black hole of information has perversely created an overabundance of fantasies, some very pessimistic, some as absurdly bright as a foreigner on...

The books premise that there will naturally be war between a dominant power and a rising one seems to describe the exception rather than the rule, because as change is the only constant their is always some power rising and some power falling, but wars are not happening in most of the world most of the time. For example; in the 1980's Japan was asia's leading economy, now it is china. there was no war between the 2. Similarly russia was asia's dominant military power (Usurped by china again) I

Present foreign policy in the United States is examined in the context of one of the earliest consequential wars ever written about: “While others identified an array of contributing causes of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides went to the heart of the matter. When he turned the spotlight on ‘the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta,’ he identified a primary driver at the root of some of history’s most catastrophic and puzzling wars.” Fear. Allison has the advantage of recen...

Destined for War by Graham Allison is a book about the geopolitics between China and the US, specifically whether the two super-powers can avoid going to war and potentially destroying the whole world in the process. The author places this geopolitical situation within the so-called Thucydide's Trap. This 'trap' refers to the situation when a rising power (China) challenges an established power (USA). It was first noted by the Greek historian Thucydide in antiquity when the rising power of Athen...

As a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Graham Allison has had privileged access to policymakers in Washington for many decades, and was mentored by none other than the notorious Henry Kissinger. What he has seen, vis-à-vis US policy on China, frightens him. American officials have until recently downplayed China's commercial and military gains, and adopted an incoherent strategy, one which "permits everything and prohibits nothing". In actual fact, a patient, carefully calcu...

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham AllisonOnly the dead have seen the end of war. Or have they? Renowned political scientist Graham Allison seeks to analyze the complex situation that presents itself between the United States and China in Destined for War, and discover if the historical precedent of destructive conflict can truly be avoided. Above all else, I found this book to extremely gripping and informative, written in a digestible essay style that s...

An interesting insight into how realists in International Relations view the ongoing security competition between the USA and China in the Asia Pacific and beyond. Allison draws upon his understanding of the Peloponnesian wars and puts forward a novel argument that in the past 500 years, on the majority of occasions the rising power and the established power would find it almost impossible to prevent the steady march to war. Writing before the Coronavirus war of words and the trade war, Allison

Great book to understand the geopolitics of the US and China today and the implications should a big rethinking process about the role of each other is not implemented in the short term. Having read this after Yergin’s The New Map was quite complementary and now I will go for Kissinger’s On China to complete a triad on geopolitics and global superpowers.

There is much that is important in this book. Allison makes some strong points about the differences between China’s worldview and our own, and how it affects our respective approaches to the world. He discusses how we need to approach foreign policy, and more importantly, what we need to understand about ourselves before we can come up with a coherent strategy to deal with China and other international challenges.However, the book never quite comes together. It feels like scraps from several di...