Destined for War summary

Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a decades-long war raged across southern Europe and the waters of the Mediterranean Sea – the Peloponnesian War. Fought between the rival kingdoms of Sparta, an established power, and Athens, a rising force, the Athenians’ eventual defeat heralded the beginning of the end of the Ancient Greek empire.

Why did the Athenians and the Spartans go to war? Plenty has been written about the diplomatic failings, shifting alliances, and territorial squabbles that lit the spark of the conflict. But contemporaneous Thucydides offers a far more succinct explanation: Athens’s rise to power inspired fear in Sparta. When this dynamic occurs, conflict is all but inevitable.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, we’ve seen this dynamic playing out again, between two different powers: the US, which established itself as the dominant political and economic global force in the twentieth century, and China, whose swift growth sees it poised to topple American supremacy.

China’s rise as a global power has been swift. In 1971, Henry Kissinger visited China – then largely closed to foreigners – to lay the groundwork for President Richard Nixon’s visit the following year. The statesman recalled a provincial, rustic backwater. Fast-forward a few decades and the picture is quite different.

Now, China has transformed from a largely agricultural society to an industrialized nation, with the infrastructure to match. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd describes the intervening decades in China as a combination of the English Industrial Revolution and the global information revolution playing out at light speed. Rome may not have been built in a day, but by 2005 China was building the square foot equivalent of Ancient Rome every two weeks as part of its drive to modernize. On top of that, between 1949 and 2014 the average life expectancy of Chinese citizens doubled. It’s become the world’s leading producer of, among other things, aluminum, ships, computers, cell phones, clothing, and furniture – essentially, it’s the world’s dominant manufacturer. And it’s on track to becoming the world’s dominant economic power, period.

Between 1980 and 2017, China’s GDP grew from 7 percent of the US’s to 61 percent. To put that into perspective, every 2 years since 2008 the increase in the size of China’s GDP has been equal to that of the entire economy of neighboring India. And while in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, Chinese growth slowed by one-third – global growth slowed by half. Even when it was slowing down, China still came out ahead. 

According to the former Singaporean Prime Minister, and astute China-watcher, Lee Kuan Yew, when China comes to full power, it won’t just tip the balance of global power. “The world,” he said, ”must find a new balance”. In his view, China isn’t another big player on the world stage – China is the biggest player. The US is certainly aware that global equilibrium is shifting. After decades of focusing foreign policy on the Middle East, in 2011 then foreign secretary Hilary Clinton announced the government’s policy focus would shift to Asia.

On its side, China is thirsty for power: this is a nation that’s not afraid to enforce sanctions or threaten aggression to force its agenda through on the world stage. It’s a situation that Thucydides might find all too familiar, and a dynamic that historians have seen acted out on the world stage time and again.

In the next section, we’ll go back in time to look at some of these instances and see which other nations have found themselves stuck in a Thucydides Trap.