March 31, 2024 (EIRNS)—The American geopolitician, Harvard Professor and Kissinger protégé Graham Allison, who coined the phrase “Thucydides trap” for the so-called theory that history proves that war is the most likely result of a new power rising as an old power declines, is recommending that China and the U.S. had better prove that theory wrong.
Allison told China’s Global Times last week, in an interview published March 30, that China and the U.S. must “work imaginatively to find a new form of great power relationship,” because “our survival requires a degree of cooperation.”
He used the metaphor of “inseparable, conjoined Siamese twins” to explain. Such twins have “two heads. But they have the same nervous system or the same gastrointestinal system. If either of us were to strangle the other one, we commit suicide.” That, he argues, is “an accurate description of the conditions that the U.S. and China face today….
“We each have nuclear arsenals so robust that if either of us should attack the other in a full-scale nuclear war, we both die. That’s a pretty powerful reason not to have a war and not to let some other event or accident or miscalculation drag us into a war, whether in the Taiwan Straits or something in the South China Sea or wherever.”
