Graham Allison: "American politics is driving towards a provocation that China could not avoid"

Photo by Martha Stewart What would Thucydides make of the tensions between the US and China today? It is more than an academic question. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general and historian wrote that "it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable". As the American political scientist Graham Allison first noted in 2012, throughout history when an emerging power has threatened to displace an existing great power this has more often than not led to war, even when neither side sought it. Allison led a research…