A “dialogue” with Graham Allison about a new Peloponnesian war - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 A “dialogue” with Graham Allison about a new Peloponnesian war

Paulo Roberto de Almeida, diplomat, professor.

A response to a note by Graham Allison about the possibility of the current tariff war between U.S. and China turns to a real hot war, based on his thesis on a “Thucydides trap”.

I have just received in my mailer the following post by Professor Graham Allison, from the Belfer Center of the Harvard University (April 17: 2025, 13:33, Graham Allison GTA@comms.hks.harvard.edu):

Could the Tariff War Become a Real Hot War?

Could President Trump’s unprecedented tariff war against China stumble into a hot war with bombs exploding on American and Chinese soil?

The good news is that most tariff or economic wars have not become hot wars. The bad news is that some have.
As Washington Post columnist Max Boot’s op-ed Monday notes, this issue is explored at length in Destined for War: Can the US and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

My book was published 8 years ago in 2017 just as President Trump entered the White House for the first time.

Over the weekend, Boot emailed me to ask about what I had written. In a lively back and forth, he and I agreed that we were both hearing eerie echoes of earlier cases in which economic conflict ended in bloody war.
Among the cases that I’ve studied, the most troubling analogue is the US-Japanese confrontation that began with economic sanctions targeting imports of scrap metal and aviation fuel to Japan. This then escalated to limits on raw materials including iron, brass, copper, and finally, oil.

And as Boot notes: “It was the oil embargo that threatened to strangle the Japanese economy that led Japan to its desperate gambit of attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.”
For several other paths from where we are now to real war between the US and China, see Chapter 8 of Destined for War, “From Here to War.”
If you have reactions, I’ll be interested to receive them.
Regards,
Graham Allison
Douglas Dillon Professor of Government
Harvard Kennedy School

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As I was intrigued by his thesis, and provoked by his invitation, I decide to send him my remarks below:

Dear Professor Graham Allison,
Excuse me, and indulge me, before of any other arguments of mine, to induce in a disgusting and objectionable comparison, claiming that your provocative book is, in fact, the most dangerous one since, perhaps, Mein Kampf, from Adolf Hitler, in the second half of the 1920s. Hitler announced, very clearly, all his misconceptions and prejudices, and, less clearly, what Germany have to do to regain its prodigious national itinerary towards becoming a great power among the greats, including the less geopolitical achievements, like riding itself of the large community of Jews, already integrated to Germany and German culture (many fought in the Great War within the Armed Forces of the Empire).
Your book deals with 16 or so clashes between empires, projecting the shadow of the Peloponnesian war in our times. The irony of the “trap” is that the authoritarian power finished as the victor against the “democratic” republic, not out of a simple and direct war, but because of many diplomatic errors made by Athens inside the OTAN-like League, which provoked and led many of its members to move toward Sparta.
I think that you erroneously extended the historical accounts of all those clashes to the current opposition between U.S. and China (because of economic and geopolitical reasons), to a questionable suggestion that the two greatest powers of our days could arrive at a war, like all those conflicts (some global ones) aligned in your book, destined to eliminate the ascending or the consolidated power, one of the two, in a zero sum game of inevitable competition, up to death. That is the “dangerous” side of your book.
Sorry, but history does not serve as a prediction for the current situation, as the nature of competition between the present “Peloponnesian” actors has nothing to do with the Thucydides trap and is not deemed to have the same results or consequences of the Ancient Greece or the sequential clashes between subsequent empires.
U.S.A. is solely responsible for the crazy decision to try to apply the same Kennan containment doctrine to contemporary China, something impossible in first place. U.S.A. was and is the very provocative power that dismantled the Kissinger-Nixonian tactical move consisting in isolating the very expansive power of Slavic and Czarist origin and facilitating the reintegration of the Middle Empire into the modern world, after the foolishness of Maoist years, which finished to debase PRC almost to the ground.
China, because of an idiotic emperor – perhaps like another one in our days – isolated itself from the world. As a consequence, China lost the first, the second and the third industrial revolutions, this one during the foolish Mao years (I do not enter into irresponsible comparisons, but I do know of a new “emperor” that is trying to retrocede a great power toward the second industrial revolution, that of coal, oil, explosion motors, and so on). China, also with the American help, reintegrated itself into the Bretton Woods and multilateral trade system world order, starting in 2001, but with the tragic American attack to China embassy in Beograd in 1999, which moved again the Middle Empire towards the declining, but revisionist, Slavic expansionist Putin new empire. Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS were the results of the fake-Kennan American policy towards China, what a tragic error.
Your book came ten years later, but still leaves in an inexistent Second Cold War, which exists only in the imagination of Putin and Western observers. China does not see world situation by that lens, but your book tries to give this impression, which I consider a real pity, coming from the author of The Essence of Decision, which dealt with a real Cold War, almost converted into a hot war, catastrophic as it could turned to be.
U.S. economic sanctions against Japan in the 1930s have no connection at all with current sanctions against Russia and China because of Crimea or Ukraine, since 2014 and 2022. Talking about appropriation of IP or profiting from advancements of other countries was the American practice since the beginning of the Republic until the IIWW, as many other countries also practiced in their respective development paths, but today, as you perhaps have already concluded, China is ahead of Western technologies in many industrial sectors, including, may be, in AI.
I do not know if you agreed, many years ago, before your book was published, with Niall Ferguson’s suggestion of a “Chimerica” scenario, a positive cooperation between two great powers, not only with reciprocal benefits to both, but also presenting many big chances to eliminate extreme misery and to reduce poverty in developing countries. It is a difficult scenario to imagine, not because of PRC ambitions, but because of American hubris and arrogance, and for its impossible desire to be the only and the exclusive greatest power in History.
I’m not an adept of a Toynbeean perspective for the American empire (only a hundred years since its birth), but History is on the move, and Trumpian America is moving towards the past, not even slouching towards the future. There is not any Thucydides trap in that path, and no possibility of a kind of a “Peloponnesian” war between the two great powers. I sincerely believe that you could revise your book and ideas, based on a simplistic model and a simplified version of past clashes between great powers. History is much more complex and subtle.
With great appreciation for your work in Belfer Center, sincerely yours,
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Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brazilian diplomat (retired) and professor
(55.61) 99176-9412
pralmeida@me.com
diplomatizzando.blogspot.com
CV Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/9470963765065128
https://unb.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paulo_Almeida2

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 4900, 17 Abril 2025, 3 p.

Existe essa coisa de "armadilha de Tucidides? Não acredito - Delanceyplace, Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Analogias históricas são sempre enganosas, e mesmo que fossem verdadeiras, algumas, não podem ser transformadas em "camisas de força", em "teorias da inevitabilidade histórica" do confronto entre um poder emergente e um outro já estabelecido, mas eventualmente declinante (ou não), ao passo que o desafiador quer cavar o seu lugar ao sol.
Acreditando que os processos históricos são sempre únicos e originais, não acredito, portanto, nessa tal de "armadilha de Tucidides".
Em todo caso, adoro ler história, assim que recomendo este texto, e talvez o próprio livro.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Destined For War by Graham Allison.

With its vast global empire, Great Britain had been the leading power in Europe for a century or more. But by the early 1900s, Germany had surpassed it in both the size of its economy and its population. This led to deep suspicions and insecurities on both sides, and helped set the stage for the Great War that started in 1914: "Since its (1871) victory over France and unification un­der Bismarck, Germany had become the strongest land power in Eu­rope, with an economic dynamism to match. German exports were now fiercely competitive with British products, making Berlin a for­midable commercial rival. Before 1900, however, the British Empire saw it more as an economic than a strategic threat. Indeed, a number of senior British politicians favored a German alliance, and some tried to broker one. "By 1914, London's calculations had changed completely. Britain found itself fighting alongside its former rivals Russia and France (and later the US) to prevent Germany from gaining strategic mastery in Europe. The story of how that happened -- how, among a range of competitors, Germany became Britain's main adversary -- is a testa­ment to the fear felt by a ruling power when a rising one appears to endanger its security. In Britain's case, that fear was concentrated by a growing German fleet that could only be intended for use against the Royal Navy.

States of the German Empire (Kingdom of Prussia with its provinces shown in blue).

"The story of Germany's rise, and its decision to build a navy so alarm­ing to the British, is in many ways a simple one. It is the story of a country that experienced rapid, almost dizzying development in a very short time, but saw its path to global greatness blocked by what it con­sidered an unjust and covetous incumbent. "Ever since Bismarck melded a patchwork of dozens of states into one German Empire following the triumphant wars against Austria (1866) and France (1870-71), Germany had emerged as an economic, mili­tary, and cultural phenomenon dominating the European continent. The Germans were no longer the objects of other people's history but the subject of their own story of national greatness. ... "The seesaw on which Germany and Britain occupied op­posite ends was shifting relentlessly. By 1914, Germany's population of sixty-five million was 50 percent larger than Britain's. Germany grew to become Europe's leading economy, surpassing Britain by 1910. By 1913, it accounted for 14.8 percent of global manufacturing output, overtaking Britain's 13.6 percent. Prior to unification, it had produced only half the steel Britain did; by 1914, it produced twice as much. Writing in 1980 -- before the rise of China -- Paul Kennedy wondered 'whether the relative productive forces -- and, by extension, the rel­ative national power -- of any two neighboring states before or since had altered in such a remarkable way in the course of one man's lifetime as occurred here between Britain and Germany.' "Britons experienced Germany's industrial growth most immediately in the form of German exports displacing British products at home and abroad. Between 1890 and 1913, Britain's exports to Germany doubled --but were still worth only half the value of its imports from Germany, which had tripled. A best-selling book in 1896, Made in Germany, warned Britons that 'a gigantic commercial State is arising to menace our prosperity, and contend with us for the trade of the world.' "Germany was overtaking Britain not only in the heavy industry and factory products of the First Industrial Revolution, but also in the elec­trical and petrochemical advances of the Second Industrial Revolution. By the turn of the century, Germany's organic-chemical industry con­trolled 90 percent of the global market. In 1913, Britain, France, and Italy together produced and consumed only about 80 percent of the electricity that Germany did. By 1914, Germany had twice as many telephones as Britain, and almost twice as much railway track. Ger­man science and technology had surpassed Britain's to become the best in the world, fostered by a supportive government and nourished by esteemed universities. Between 1901, when Nobel Prizes were first awarded, and 1914, Germany won eighteen prizes overall, more than twice as many as the United Kingdom and four times as many as the United States. In physics and chemistry alone, Germany won ten No­bels -- almost twice as many as the UK and the US combined."

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Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? Author: Graham Allison Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Copyright 2017 by Graham Allison Pages: 63-65