China never entered the Thucydides Trap that US history invented.
What is China’s role in the world after American Primacy? It is not snared in the Thucydides Trap. It is haunted by an American nightmare of Banquo’s Ghost.
Both these visions of China’s role, after the breakdown of the postwar world order, are defined by Western cultural traditions. Neither image will control China’s future role in the world after 2024. China’s future, as with its past, will be spun from the many threads of world history into its own unique cloth.
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China and the Thucydides Trap
The Thucydides Trap was defined by Graham Allison in Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap (2017). It has become the governing metaphor for the Western foreign policy community’s account of China’s rise from ruins to prosperity in the post-1945 world order. Allison defined the metaphor so.
“As a rapidly ascending China challenges America’s accustomed predominance, these two nations risk falling into a deadly trap first identified by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Writing about a war that devastated the two leading city-states of classical Greece two and a half millennia ago, he explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” (p. vi)
Whether Thucydides was correct in this interpretation mattered little to Allison, let alone the thousands of geopolitics analyts and strategists who adopted this loosely stated maxim of a failed Greek general. Allison read Thucydides as historical scripture because he was in the business of myth-making about American hegemony. This banal sentence from Thucydides’ long History of the Peloponnesian Wars (written c. 400 BCE) is recast by Allison as a “primal insight” that described a “perilous historical pattern.” Allison sounded the alarm to the power elite, whom he had long courted. The USA must take “difficult and painful actions” to avert war with China, tactically, and, strategically, to contain “a rising power [that] threatens to displace a ruling power.”
The success of the idea of the Thucydides Trap did not spring from truth or historical insight into the conflict of two ancient city-states, which had populations estimated in the range of current-day Waco and Pittsburgh. It sprang from the anxiety - the threat of a rising power - and the American myth that it was the democratic ruling power that shaped the postwar world order. The USA was the contemporary reincarnation of Athens. Allison so restated a long tradition of American and British history, which interpreted America’s rise in the post-1945 world through fables of classical Greek and Roman imperial and republican history. But now the threat was Sparta. It was not Communism. It was China.
Despite its success, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap is poor history. Its account of the post-1945 world order is full of the standard American cliches and has none of the insights of the rise and fall of global empires presented by John Darwin in After Tamerlane. Allison’s book is also shoddy world history. He claimed to have established a database or ‘case file’ to support his conclusions. The case files are shown below. A brief scan shows the Euro-Atlantic bias. A reader of John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires immediately detects this iconic book of international relations to be junk history.
Moreover, as George Yeo, former foreign minister of Singapore, points out, Allison’s ‘primal insight’ into history came from deep ignorance of the history of Asia and the state he feared, China.
If China were like the old Soviet Union, then such a fear is warranted, then the lessons of the Peloponnesian War, the "Thucydides Trap," becomes relevant. But China is in fact of a different nature.
And while understanding the Greeks gives one an important window into the evolution of Western society, the understanding of East Asian society requires a different window, and it is a window into the rise and fall of China.
China never entered the Thucydides Trap. Its history and traditions of statecraft are different. The Western strategic imagination has trapped itself in this fallacious, perilous historical projection.
Despite the shoddy history and cultural blindness of the Thucydides Trap, it dominates American, Anglo-American and Western accounts of the China Dilemma. Allison’s book provided a fake veneer of classical learning to the ‘realist’ postwar American theory of great power relations. It is a retelling of international relations as a no-rules fight to the death between hegemon and challenger. It is a fantasy of American Primacy.
But there is a deeper, darker story from the Western Canon behind the fears of American and Western leaders that a rising power will displace them as the ruling power of the postwar world order. This story is more profound than Allison’s fable from the father of history. It is rooted in Anglo-American culture even today because it expresses a deeper insight into power, violence and rivalry. It is a story of a nightmare and a murder. This story haunts US leaders to believe that the Thucydides Trap was indeed a primal insight into history. There is a spectre haunting the Western foreign policy imagination of the role that China might play in world history. That spectre is Banquo’s Ghost.
The American Nightmare of China as Banquo’s Ghost
In Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Macbeth, a challenger to the Scottish throne becomes the hegemon through bloody murder, by the regicide of Duncan. The challenger, Macbeth, has an ally, Banquo, who questions his friend’s ambition to dominate. Macbeth feared Banquo’s good intentions and his preference for harmonious civility.
“... Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep, and in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be feared. ‘Tis much he dares,
And to that dauntless temper of his mind
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety. There is none but he
Whose being I do fear, and under him
My genius is rebuked as, it is said,
Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.
(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 50-58)
Macbeth killed his king, Duncan. Fear of a life without hegemony then drove Macbeth to murder again, this time his ally, Banquo. At a banquet celebrating Macbeth’s new world order, however, Banquo returns as a Ghost. Macbeth fears the dead have come to “push us from our stools.’ The Ghost inspires fear and madness, as much as guilt and remorse. Shocked by the appearance of Banquo, Macbeth speaks:
Approach thou like the ruggèd Russian bear,
The armed rhinoceros, or the’ Hyrcan* tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
shall never tremble…
… Hence, horrible shadow,
Unreal mock’ry, hence!
(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 1, from lines 99-106)
[* from Hyrcania, the region near Iran and Turkmenistan]
When Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or countless think tanks and journalists in the Western media, summon the threat of China, they do not use language with Shakespeare’s skill. They talk of pacing challenges, strategic competition, autocracies, or the slogans like ‘Red Threat’ and ‘Take down the CCP.’ But they are driven mad by the same fear. The rebuke to their genius spurs a fear that a rival will displace them from their stools. They are engulfed in madness because they cannot admit that they have wronged China.
The USA-led post-1945 world order’s relationship to China is the same as Macbeth’s victory banquet’s relationship to Banquo’s ghost. When American leaders praise the liberal rules based order, the world order which they shaped through endless war and murder since 1945, they resemble Macbeth at his banquet celebrating his blood-stained kingship. Like Banquo’s Ghost, China haunts the US leaders, whose consciences cannot suppress the memory of their crime. China was the wartime friend that became, in Rana Mitter’s term, the forgotten ally that the West wronged (Rana Mitter Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II 1937-1945).
China was to be one of the “Four Policemen” of world order after 1945. It was the first signatory of the United Nations Charter. But when the USA “lost China” in 1949, it betrayed Banquo. It denied China membership of the United Nations, and gave the seat to the government-in-exile that had fled to Taiwan, and so controlled 0.4 per cent of China’s land area. It excluded China and the USSR from the final peace treaty with Japan, the former coloniser of Taiwan, and rebuilt its security architecture in the Western Pacific in the islands of the Japanese Empire that had menaced China and other East Asian states for fifty years. It fought a horrific war in Korea, killing millions to contain the horrible red shadow of China’s Ghost. It excluded the real China from the world diplomatic system until the late 1970s.
Rana Mitter argues that this exclusion from the world contributed to the tragedies of Chinese history after 1949: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Mao may have exercised power from the barrel of a gun, but the American fear of being pushed from its stool left blood on the hands of successive American Presidents from Truman to Biden, and now again Trump.
America denied China full access to the world economy until 2001, when China was admitted to the Bretton-Woods postwar world order institution of the World Trade Organisation. They did so with the cockiness of a hyperpower that had “won the Cold War” and brought an end to history. Banquo’s Ghost, for a decade or more, shapeshifted into Niall Ferguson and Henry Kissinger’s ‘Chimerica’. But the terror came back to haunt America in many forms: pivots to Asia, tariffs on China, chip wars, Xinjiang alleged ‘genocides’, Indo-Pacific strategies, South China Sea ‘free navigation’ disputes, social credit schemes, Wuhan viruses, plans for regional hegemony, the attack on the mighty US dollar, the fight for democracy against the ‘axis of upheaval’, agents of chaos, and, of course, the Thucydides Trap.
The Thucydides Trap and John Mearsheimer’s anti-China realism are both screen stories, in the psychoanalytic sense of a self-justifying memory that conceals a more traumatic, primal insight. They both cover the American terror that the USA will be displaced as global hegemon. They disclose guilt for past wrongs. They expose wounds of regret. The Americans scrambled for power in the twentieth century over the dead bodies of tens of millions of Eurasians. Its Greatness rose on the backs of its betrayed ally, who had a “dauntless temper” of mind and “wisdom that doth guide his valour/ To act in safety.” These pricks of conscience fuel hate for the great state of China that the USA has wronged.
Dostoevsky wrote that we hate those whom we have wronged. So it is for America. The vast Anglo-American culture industries, including those who practice history, spew forth reams of this hatred every week, with increased frequency since 2017, the year Donald Trump became President and Graham Allison published Destined for War. So much destructiveness has sprung from this fear of Banquo’s Ghost. Biden’s failed chip war, Trump’s tariff bluff, and even a reckless threat to stymie the flow of oil from Iran are among the looming carnage that American terror has brought to the world.
The tragedy is, alas, ghosts are not real. The threat of China “taking over the world” is a figment of the Western strategic imagination. In Destined for War, Allison recalled, with his trademark faux scholarship, Napoleon’s historically inaccurate remark that, in 1800, “China was sleeping, but when she wakes, she will shake the world.” Allison continued to shout ‘Fire!’ in the hall to his fellow Americans. “Today China has awakened, and the world is beginning to shake.”
Allison was wrong. China never slept. History never does. America never slayed her, despite all its plans. Banquo’s ghost was never there. It is time for the USA to wake from its long nightmare of ‘losing China.’
To reimagine the history of China in the world, and to support the development of peace and prosperity across the whole world, we need a different vision of Chinese history in the world.
We may even have to turn to Chinese literature, not the Western classics. We might have to listen to the stories of the past written and told by Chinese people, not Anglo-American academics, let alone the national security community.
Even the best Western histories of China in the world still suffer from the distemper that comes when we imagine China as Banquo’s Ghost at the Glorious Banquet of the End of History. Especially in the Anglo-American academy, histories of China are still written in the stifling intellectual conditions of Cold War, even if it is Niall Ferguson’s beloved Cold War II.
But I am on the search for better histories of China, not haunted by this American spectre and not obscured by the London fog of imperial nostalgia. I do not know enough Chinese history and have no Chinese language skills. But I am still searching, and sharing my discoveries with you. I have shared some discoveries from my search over the last two years on the Burning Archive, including:
Red Memory. Dread Trauma, my review of journalist Tania Branigan‘s account in Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, of the memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
My wonderful interview with historian of Chinese-Australians, Sophie Loy-Wilson, and my reflections How to mend our broken Asian heart: Sophie Loy-Wilson on China, Australia and generosity in history
My reflections on James Curran’s history of the Australia-China relationship since 1945
My discussion on The Duran of AUKUS and Australia-China relationships
My interview with Warwick Powell, How Australia, China & Asia can live together in a multipolar world
My Interview, How defence and diplomacy can avoid a US-China war in Asia. A conversation with Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute
My reflection, How did Multicultural Australia Misread the Multipolar World?, prompted by these three interviews, and
My pieces on the two Chinese winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature in the Nobel Archive (yes, one in sixty of the prizes to this great culture)
Through these writings, I have reflected on my idea that since 1970 in its attitudes to China Australia has over-valued trade, and under-valued culture. Our complex, close and long-standing Australia-China relationships have been too much about money, and not enough about shared meaning. In writing this week’s piece, I have come to realise even more profoundly how the soft curves of culture, through the American nightmare image of China as Banquo’s Ghost, shape the tough guys of hard geopolitics.
Truly, culture is upriver from geopolitics.
In Part Two of this story I will explore how to reimagine the world with China, without Banquo’s Ghost and with all the rich detail of its histories and literature.
I will show how viewing China as Banquo’s Ghost distorts even the best Western histories
I will share more of the discoveries from my search over the last year for the best histories of China, especially in the post 1945 world, and
I will foreshadow some of the histories that I will share with you in 2025 as we read history together to reimagine how the great powers of the world can live in a symphony of civilizations at peace in a multipolar world.
I have broken my essay on China and the postwar world order into two parts this week to keep the reading length manageable.
The second part will provide you a reading guide to China’s role in the world since 1945, and after 2024. It will come out on Monday 9 December, in lieu of my planned audiobook mini for paid subscribers.
That audiobook mini will be deferred to an end-of-year reading on 23 December. It will be Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, and will include my commentary on how this famous essay gave birth to the imagery of the Burning Archive. And how his concept of redemptive history continues to inspire me.
Both Part Two of this essay and my audio reading of Benjamin are offered to paid subscribers.
So please subscribe now to learn more from history, and to live in tune with this changing world, free of Shakespearean spectres.
Cut and pasted from Zhang Weiying's recent piece on the stimulus...
"I must stress that the currently widespread "Thucydides Trap" mindset is a profoundly destructive notion that could mislead the country. We must free ourselves from this intellectual constraint. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a conflict between the Athenian and Spartan alliances, was not the inevitable result of the rise of a new power, as Thucydides claimed. The war was not inevitable or natural. Instead, it resulted from political leaders' arrogance, resentment, and vengeance-driven attitudes and their ignorance, misjudgments, and third-party provocations. Athens’ excessive greed and unrealistic goals ultimately led to its catastrophic failure in the war.
Donald Kagan, a Yale University scholar, conducted in-depth research on the Peloponnesian War. He found that the politicians involved lacked foresight, mistakenly believing they could achieve significant gains at low costs. They relied on past experiences to craft strategies without adequately accounting for the risks of misjudgments and miscalculations, nor did they prepare contingency plans. Thus, the war's outbreak was neither inevitable nor the result of irresistible forces; it arose from specific decisions made in a particular context.
Similarly, I believe that our current and future international environment depends on our choices and actions."
It's a good read over at Pekingnology....
Thanks for this. I was never able to get more than halfway through Allisons's idiotic take on the matter. I'm American, living in Wuhan, not an academic in any form, married to a Professor of Chinese History at a national university. My study of China history came through the back door, so to speak. My interest in the person sparked a fascination with the topic, and here I am. I spend most of my time traveling in country. Traveling in China is immersing oneself in its history.
I'll be watching for more.