Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2018 LIONEL GELBER PRIZE

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
 
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: FINANCIAL TIMES * THE TIMES (LONDON) * AMAZON
 
“Allison is one of the keenest observers of international affairs around.”— JOE BIDEN, former vice president of the United States
 
China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, violence is the likeliest result. Over the past five hundred years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times; war broke out in twelve. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America, and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case looks grim. A trade conflict, cyberattack, Korean crisis, or accident at sea could easily spark a major war.
      In Destined for War, eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison masterfully blends history and current events to explain the timeless machinery of Thucydides’s Trap—and to explore the painful steps that might prevent disaster today.
 
“[A] must-read book in both Washington and Beijing.”— NIALL FERGUSON, BOSTON GLOBE
 
“[Allison is] a first-class academic with the instincts of a first-rate politician.”— BLOOMBERG NEWS
 
“[Full of] wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history . . . [A] fine book.”— NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

• Hundred-Year Marathon
• Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security)
• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
• On China
• The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State
• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War
• The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
• The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Updated Edition)
• Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power
• The Lessons of History