The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Could China and America be destined for peace, not war?
COMMENT | NNANDA KIZITO SSERUWAGI | How about this: rather than being destined for war, America and China were actually destined for peace? Could America’s treating of China as an enemy risk turning it into one? And could the opposite also be true?
The American scholar Graham Allison has gained worldwide notoriety (the idea is grim, so I will not call it ‘fame’) for predicting the likelihood of a war between the United States and China. His explanation is the Thucydides Trap: a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. Allison wrote a book, “Destined for War”, in which he explained why Thucydides’ Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century.
He historicises his prediction by walking back to the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece. The war was recorded “blow by blow”, to borrow Will Durant’s poetic narration, by the historian Thucydides. He explained that it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.
According to Allison’s study, over the past 500 years, similar conditions/scenarios have occurred sixteen times, out of which war broke out in twelve. He therefore analogises that as a rising China continues to compromise the global influence of the American empire, and especially with both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promising to make their countries “great again”, a similar, seventeenth case could be on the horizon.
Allison’s hope, or suggestion, is for China to scale back its ambitions or for Washington to accept becoming number two in the Pacific. If neither of that happens, he predicts that anything, it could be a trade conflict, a cyberattack, or even an accident at sea, could easily escalate into all-out war between the two powers.
However, could it be that Graham Allison overstates or misinterprets the historical parallels and war scenarios based on his reading of Thucydides?
One of the main antagonists against Allison’s ‘Destined for War’ prediction is the eminent Chinese current affairs commentator and former interpreter for the late leader Deng Xiaoping, Victor Gao.
Victor, fluent in his command of the English language in ways that would make Churchill envious, respectfully disagrees with Allison, analysing that his “destined for war” speculation conflates selective pre-atomic history with the post-atomic realities of the world of today. He argues that the destined-for-war proposition is a false destiny for China and America because neither the Chinese people nor the Americans, nor mankind as a whole, can deal with the consequences, i.e., Armageddon.
In retaliation against the Thucydides Trap theory, Victor developed “The Inevitable Peace” theory. What this means is that war is not and should never be an option for Beijing or Washington by any stretch of the imagination.
It is plausible that since both powers are armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons sufficient to destroy each other multiple times, and since any conventional armed conflict between them would quickly escalate out of control and lead to irreversible consequences to mankind, war between America and China should simply never happen and must even never be conceived.
We all should push for a philosophy to be adopted among both Chinese and American leaders that peace between their two countries is simply inevitable because if they go to war, neither of our countries will survive or win.
Therefore, it does not help for America to systematically weaponize economic and financial means and elevate them to the same plane as traditional military and alliance tools, as it has done in its recently unveiled National Security Strategy.
China’s narrative and framework of economics as a win-win engine of interdependence is the way to go. Besides, Trump’s politics of “America-Takes-All” are not serving his country, seeing as it appears that all they have achieved is that they have placed intense stress on global economic governance and U.S.-China/many countries’ commercial relations.
It is not incomprehensible to imagine mechanisms in which both America and China could cooperate instead of fighting in zero-sum competitions, even in our Global South. One of the things to do could be revitalising and cooperating across multilateral and regional platforms. These bodies could become critical vital pressure-release valves for both powers to monitor each other’s heartbeats at a micro scale. Both America and China could pursue parallel or joint financing models in African infrastructure or mining industries, thereby co-creating supply chain resilience funds via the IMF, World Bank and the G20.
With such an intricate web of cooperation, American concerns about such aspects of Chinese globalisation like the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative, would be addressed because America would be part of the economic activity in the Global South, with its corporations working alongside Chinese companies.
If it is not obvious by now, maybe we should remind both powers that neither of them can change the other. And since war is not an option in their destiny, then they must choose peaceful coexistence. They must meet each other halfway. They must pursue common prosperity. They must build mutual trust and cooperation.
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The writer is a Ugandan thinking about Uganda.
