P.H. Yu — China Won’t Wait

China’s rise is both unambiguous and unstoppable, whether the West likes it or not. Refusing to acknowledge reality will only generate more tension – and more risk, because failing to accommodate China will destabilize the rules-based order on which the world has come to rely.…

The handwriting is on the wall, but in Chinese characters that few in the West seem to be able to read. Uh oh. Collision course.

This post can be read as advice to the liberal West, or as a warning — or both.

Project Syndicate
China Won’t Wait
P.H. Yu | Chairman of the Council of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University

Xinhua — FM: China, U.S. can avoid Thucydides Trap, Kindleberger Trap

China and the United States can sidestep the Thucydides Trap and the Kindleberger Trap and jointly chart bilateral ties from a long-term perspective, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Monday in Beijing.…

The Thucydides Trap refers to a warning by the ancient Greek historian that cataclysmic war can erupt if a rising power causes fear in an established power.

The two countries will not fall to the Kindleberger Trap either, Wang said, as a single country cannot provide all public goods for the world with such complexity, and international cooperation is the only possible choice.

Charles Kindleberger, an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan who later taught at MIT, believes that the disastrous decade of the 1930s was caused by the U.S. replacing Britain as the largest global power but failing to take on Britain's role in providing public goods.

Applauding U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's remarks during his recent visit to China, Wang said that China stands ready to advance bilateral ties from a strategic perspective.
Tillerson said that the United States and China should jointly chart bilateral ties for the next 50 years and plan all-round cooperation.…

China stands ready to shoulder its due international responsibilities, but never wants to lead the world, Wang said.

Ecns
FM: China, U.S. can avoid Thucydides Trap, Kindleberger Trap
Xinhua | Editor: Gu Liping

Also

China's door opens wider to outside world: premier
Xinhua | Editor: Gu Liping

China Hand — Thucydides Crap

Don't forget to watch the video clip at the end (Groucho)

China Matters
Thucydides Crap

China Hand

John Glaser — The Ugly Truth About Avoiding War With China

While ISIS is the threat that keeps Washington policymakers up at night, it’s the rise of China that has international relations theorists in a panic. Graham Allison argues persuasively that China’s rise portends a classic Thucydides Trap. His research shows that in twelve of the last sixteen cases over the past five hundred years, when a rising power challenged an established one, the result was war. John Mearsheimer, somewhat more bluntly, warns that “China cannot rise peacefully.” It’s an impending great power clash that makes the threat from ISIS look like child’s play.

But China threatens the United States only insofar as America insists on being the dominant power in China’s backyard, a policy that actually contributes very little to U.S. security. If we abandon our strategy of primacy, the risk of a clash will shrink away. If we try to contain China’s rise, on the other hand, these predictions of doom may prove right.…

The cost of trying to maintain a "unipolar" (read imperialistic) world order.

Primacy could conceivably be justified if the United States derived commensurate benefits. That does not appear to be the case. As Robert Jervis has written, “the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the past,” but in a world of nuclear weapons, with “low security threats and great common interests among the developed countries,” the game is not “worth the candle.” Charles Glaser similarly argues, “Unipolarity is much overrated.” It is not necessary to protect core national interests and in fact causes the U.S. to “lose track of how secure it is and consequently pursue policies that are designed to increase its security but turn out to be too costly and/or to have a high probability of backfiring.” Nor does U.S. dominance reap much in the way of tangible economic rewards. Daniel Drezner contends, “The economic benefits from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated. . . . There is little evidence that military primacy yields appreciable geoeconomic gains” and therefore “an overreliance on military preponderance is badly misguided.”

The struggle for primacy in East Asia is not fundamentally one for security or tangible economic benefits. What is at stake is largely status and prestige. As the scholar William Wohlforth explains, hegemonic power transitions throughout history actually see the rising power seeking “recognition and standing rather than specific alterations in the existing rules and practices that constituted the order of the day.” In Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, for example, “the rise of Athens posed unacceptable threats not to the security or welfare of Sparta but rather to its identity as leader of the Greek world.” Similarly, the power transition between a rising Germany and a dominant Great Britain in the lead up to World War I was characterized by an “absence of tangible conflicts of interests.” U.S. paranoia over the rise of China is less about protecting significant strategic and economic returns, which are marginal if not actually negative, and more about a threat to its status, prestige and reputation as the world’s sole superpower. In no way is that a just cause for war.…

The National Interest
The Ugly Truth About Avoiding War With China
John Glaser

Graham Allison — The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?

Must-read weekend reading. This is where the action will in this half of the 21st century. (The second half will be occupied with the consequences of climate change.)

The Atlantic
The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
Graham Allison | Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School

See also

This is extremely relevant to the above and suggests that the US will inevitably fall into the Thucydides trap owing to "messianic universalism follows easily from providential exceptionalism" as a longstanding foundation stone for the edifice of US foreign policy culturally and institutionally.

Salon
How America built its empire: The real history of American foreign policy that the media won’t tell you

Patrick L. Smith interviews Perry R, Anderson, Distinguished Professor of History, UCLA

Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Secret War in 135 Countries
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism