Q: Dr. Allison, nice to have you in our podcast.
A: I am honored to be here.
Q: Your bestseller book, Destined for War, is translated into Chinese and it is also a very popular book in China I believe right now. You are right now here promoting this book across this country. I'm very curious what kind of responses you receive in general from your Chinese readers?
A: That's a good question. So, uh, the book has only been published in Mandarin for about two weeks, but I’d uh, spent two days in Shanghai because Shanghai Publishing Company is the publisher. And so I was at Fudan, meeting with people in the government in Shanghai as well as in the think tanks. And then I’ve been right now two days in Beijing, and I am here at this conference. I think generally the reception been quite positive. I was last night at Renmin University, and there were three or four hundred students who seemed very excited and very lively engaged. Two or three professors did reactions to the book, and we had a debate with students and others. Uh, so I think, uh, and I’ve been talking to people in the government about it, who read the book carefully. So I think a good reception. I think people when the English version has been published till now for about eighteen months. And when I was here in Beijing last December, uh, it was also being read widely in the English version, even though the government had a mandarin version that they had been circulating around and many people at that stage wanted to debate whether there was such a thing as Thucydides traps, or whether the forces were the sort that I described. Now, I think that argument, most people believe, is over, of course, there is Thucydides dynamic. Of course, china is a rising power. Of course the US is a ruling power. Of course, this impact is very risky. Uh, so now the question is how to escape the Thucydides traps. And that's the question I’m extremely interested in. So I’ve been listening especially to Chinese friends and colleagues. And students, I said last night, young people are likely to think of some ideas that old people are not going to think about.
Q: like what?
A: If allowing the forces of history as usual in the Thucydides and rivalry between a rising power and a ruling power as a serious risk of a war, a real war that can kill many many many millions of people. Then, what can sensible people do now to prevent this? We should be thinking of ideas. And I now have collected a menu. It's called avenues of escape, and no one of which yet is compelling to me. But all are interesting and I’m looking for more ideas. So I’m hoping you can, maybe from some of your, uh, your audience that people will think, okay, how could countries, like china and like America, how could they escape the Thucydides trap? And I bet some of them have some good ideas.
Q: Yeah, I believe so. Just now you mention the responses from your Chinese audience and readers. I'm also curious, is there difference between your Chinese readers and American readers?
A: That's an interesting question.
Q: Because we are from different perspective, different cultures.
A: Well, initially, uh, there was some similar reactions in the US for people who wanted to say, no, we don't really believe that there is something like China is not rising that far that fast. And no, the US is just a benevolent hegemon, not a ruling power. Okay, yeah. And ah, but again, I think in the US that argument is now pretty much over. And most people accept the diagnosis. Uh, there's been less imagination in the US that I would wish or hope about how to escape. So currently in the American government, uh, you have this default to what uh, in the Pence outline of the current administration strategy, the Trump strategy, it's kind of cold war 2.0, but without a coherent idea what that means, and without an appreciation of whether it fits the objective conditions of 2018. So I’m hoping that actually, and for the next several days, we'll get more ideas from the Chinese. Then we may have got from the Americans.
Q: You also have some readers and audience in White House, and I read an article last year that you visited the White House to give the lecture on the bilateral relationship with China. I'm also curious what they say when they read book and listened to your lecture.
A: Well, the person who was the national security adviser, not now, but was, H.R. McMaster, is a big fan of Thucydides's trap and he likes the analysis and he was even spurring the administration to think big about how. Matt Pottinger, who is the NSC staff person responsible for china. He's very thoughtful about this topic and very, uh, um, but he knows this is his problem, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, I talk to him regularly about this issue. He's thinking about it actively. Secretary Mattis, the secretary defense, is a great reader of Thucydides. He can recite about a hundred quotes.
Q: He recited that during his confirmation hearing.
A: Yes. So, uh, I think the administration is taking it quite seriously. And in the Chinese government, at the highest levels, there’s a serious conversation. In fact, Xi Jinping regularly talks about now, about how to escape Thucydides Trap. Uh, and uh, I was talking to somebody this morning, uh, um, at last year and asked me, he said, you know, why do you think Xi jinping calls for a new form of a great-power relationship? He's put out this request. We should pick a new form, or a new model, of great power relations. And he said, well, because we understand the old form goes right down the Thucydides’ path, where we don't wanna come. So we should construct the new form. I like that idea.
Q: Yeah, but the new form is not being defined yet and I am curious how they're going to define this new form.
Q: Well, I was asked this morning and the answer the same. Uh, that was before that, we haven’t defined the detail of the new form. We put it out as an idea. And we don't think that Chinese should write the whole script, should be done jointly with the Americans. And we shall all be thinking of ideas. So I put one idea on the table. Uh, so it's called “a world safe for diversity”. The world, safe, for diversity. This was the vision that John F Kennedy came up with.
A: Oh, that's 1963.
Q: 1963, after he lived through the Cuban missile crisis. So before, his objectives had been burying soviet communism, very anti-communist. Um, and he didn't give up being very anti-communism, but in the confrontation and the Cuban missile crisis, he thought it was a one in three chance that this would lead to a nuclear war. That would kill hundreds of millions of people. And when he thought about it, he thought, yikes, this is crazy. So we should think of a better way. And in the American University speech in June 1963, he said, I’m not giving up on my belief that democracy is the right form of government for everybody, and I’m not giving up on my belief soviet totalitarian communism is evil, but we cannot live in a world in which we have confrontations like the one we just have. So we're going to have this revise our strategic objective for the time being, to, we need to, tone it down a little bit. It's kinda be a world safe for diversity, in which communist totalitarian can live and we can live. So at least we survive. And then we compete to see which system is the better system. And over decades we'll find out. So that was the idea that he had. And that actually turned out to be a pretty good idea. So then we didn't have confrontations like missile crisis for the rest of the cold war. Well, I think maybe, maybe, something like that, uh, in which the US and China could together, uh, figure out how we have the world safer Chinese one party-led government, if that's what Xi Jinping wants, and that we have American democracy of the sort we have. And I think actually there's a big reason why this is maybe a very good idea now. So Chinese always say, Chinese government officials, you know, you need to understand how many problems we have. Look at all the problems of China. And Americans now are becoming more and more aware. Oh, my god, look at all the problems of America. So American democracy is now not working for sure.
Q: Yeah.
A: So Americans have enough to do at home. Let's work on our problem. The Chinese, they work on their problem. And then maybe in ten years or twenty years, we see how that's working on.
Q: Just now you mentioned American democracy is not working at this moment. And Chinese also have our own domestic issues to deal with. And do you think how much domestic politics play into this conflict at the moment?
A: Well, the answer is a lot, a lot. So, and I don't know enough about the nuances of how the politics within the Chinese contexts is working, but I certainly know a lot about how it's working in the Thucydides dynamic, as Thucydides writes about it, you start with the objective reality. So China really is rising. It really is encroaching on Americans ‘ custom prerogatives and positions. And that's a fact. And secondly, you have perceptions and misperceptions of what's happening. And those are often exaggerated, especially if you are awake to a new fact. And you think, well, my god, I didn't see this before, so you can see in America now waking up to the fact that “Oh China is bigger than I thought.” So you overreact and you and your perception of what it is is exaggerated. Third level is emotion. So, uh, uh, Thucydide wrote about what he called the fear that is instilled in Sparta. So not only you're bigger, not only I am perceiving you to be twice as big as you are, so that's mistaken. But then my reaction to it is exaggerated further by this emotion of fear. So I’m not having a clear-eyed assessment of what risks are. And then finally, just as you said, in the struggle within a democracy, in particular competing parties, uh, stake out extreme positions in order to show that one is tougher than the other one. So some Democrats are now arguing they should try to be the one that is tougher on China than Trump. So you look and say this is crazy.
