Allison, zelf opgeleid in Oxford en Harvard, werkte jarenlang als hoogleraar en decaan aan Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Naast zijn wetenschappelijke carrière heeft hij ook in het bedrijfsleven en in het openbaar bestuur carrière gemaakt. Hij was directeur van verschillende onderzoeksinstituten en werkt als commissaris voor enkele grote bedrijven. Allison is sterk betrokken geweest in het Amerikaanse defensiebeleid nadat hij werd aangesteld als adviseur voor het Amerikaanse Department of Defense in de jaren ‘60. Vanaf 1985 was hij lid van de adviesraad voor de Amerikaanse Secretary of Defense. In zijn functie van Assistent Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans was hij begin jaren negentig verantwoordelijk voor het coördineren van de strategie en het beleid naar de voormalige Sovjet-Unie.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Allison
Zijn studie Destined for War werd lovend ontvangen:
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR | SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2018 LIONEL GELBER PRIZE | NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: FINANCIAL TIMES * THE TIMES (LONDON) * AMAZON
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' — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
To make similarly wise choices, US leaders will need to muster a combination of hard thinking and harder work. They can begin with four core ideas:
Clarify vital interests. Defending America’s vital interests depends first on defining them. To prioritize everything is to prioritize nothing. Yet this is Washington’s natural reflex. In a struggle as epic as the one between China and the United States, American leaders must distinguish the vital from the vivid. For example, is maintaining US primacy in the western Pacific truly a vital national interest? Would Americans 'bear any burden' to keep China from seizing islands in the South China Sea, or even from reclaiming Taiwan? These are not rhetorical questions. Geopolitical projects—or even responses to crises—decoupled from national priorities are bound to fail.
The German philosopher Nietzsche taught us that 'the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.' In thinking clearly about America’s role in the world, we cannot improve on the wise men’s Cold War imperative. As noted in chapter 9, that means preserving the US 'as a free nation with our fundamental institutions and values intact.' That does not require defending every claim made by the Philippines or Vietnam in the South China Sea. It does not even require defending the Philippines. But it does require avoiding nuclear war with China.
Understand what China is trying to do. Applying the logic of Kennedy’s counsel, US leaders must also better understand and appreciate China’s core interests. In spite of his hard-line rhetoric, when confronted directly, Khrushchev concluded that he could compromise on nuclear arms in Cuba. Likewise, the infamous ideologue Mao proved adept at giving ground when it served China’s interests. Xi and Trump both begin with maximalist claims. But both are also dealmakers. The more the US government understands China’s aims, the better prepared it will be to resolve differences. The problem remains psychological projection: even seasoned State Department officials too often mistakenly assume China’s vital interests mirror America’s own. They would be wise to read Sun Tzu: 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.'
Cold war has come to be seen as a no-go option in international relations—something to be avoided at virtually any cost. But a quarter century after the dissolution of the Soviet empire (and at a time of renewed angst between Washington and Moscow), it is worth reflecting on the dependable elements of the old US-Soviet relationship. Pretense invites ambiguity; candor breeds clarity. “We will bury you!” and 'Evil Empire' left no doubt about where either stood. But such harsh depictions did not freeze meaningful contact, candid conversation, and even constructive compromise. If anything, these claims freed leaders to pursue negotiations from the safety of the moral high ground.
China and the US would be better served not by passive-aggressive 'should diplomacy' (calling on the other to exhibit better behavior) or by noble-sounding rhetoric about geopolitical norms, but by unapologetically pursuing their national interests. In high-stakes relationships, predictability and stability—not friendship—matter most. The US should stop playing 'let’s pretend.'
As we saw in chapter 1, many in the United States have been pretending that China’s rise is not as spectacular as it really is. They have also been pretending about the raison d’être for China’s focus on economic growth. Yes, the Communist Party’s survival depends on high rates of growth. But China’s emergence as the number-one power in Asia—and its aspiration to be number one in the world—reflects not just the imperative of economic growth but also a supremacist world view bound up in Chinese identity. In his 'Letter to My Children,' Whittaker Chambers uncovered what he felt was the philosophical driver of revolutionary communism: 'It is the great alternative faith of mankind . . . It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world.' While Xi and his Party mandarins no longer preach Marxist-Leninist doctrine, no one should be deluded into thinking that the regime today is a post-ideological movement concerned solely with its own power. Chapter 7 underlined the deeply divergent civilizational values that separate China and the West, an uncomfortable reality that polite diplomacy too often obscures.
Do strategy. In today’s Washington, strategic thinking is marginalized or even mocked. President Clinton once mused that in this fast-changing world, foreign policy had become a version of jazz: the art of improvisation. Among the dumbest statements of one of America’s smartest presidents—Barack Obama—was his claim that, given the pace of change today, 'I don’t really even need George Kennan.' Though deliberate crafting of strategy does not guarantee success, the absence of a coherent, sustainable strategy is a reliable route to failure.
Policymakers in Washington today often do not even pretend to take strategy seriously. Instead, addressing challenges posed by China, Russia, or Islamic jihadism, they say, 'Our lines of effort are . . .' Official national security strategy documents are ignored. Over the past decade, I have yet to meet a senior member of the US national security team who had so much as read the official national security strategies.
Thus, instead of NSC-68, or the Reagan administration’s revision, NSDD-75, what guides the Washington agenda on China today are grand, politically appealing aspirations with a list of assorted actions attached. In each case, a serious strategist would judge the stated objective unachievable by any level of undertaking the US can reasonably mount. Current efforts are thus bound to fail.
On China, American policy essentially seeks to cling to the status quo: the Pax Americana established after World War II. Washington repeatedly, and accurately, reminds the Chinese that this has allowed the longest peace and largest increase in economic well-being Asian nations—and specifically China—have ever seen. But that status quo cannot be sustained when the underlying economic balance of power has tilted so dramatically in China’s favor. So America’s real strategy, truth be told, is hope.
To conceive and construct a grand strategy proportionate to this challenge will require senior government officials to devote not just their political capital but also their intellectual acumen. Contrary to Obama, US national security strategy does need Kennan today—along with modern-day equivalents of Marshall, Acheson, Vandenberg, Nitze, and Truman.
Make domestic challenges central. If Xi and Trump listened to Lee Kuan Yew, they would focus first on what matters most: their domestic problems. What is the single largest challenge to American national security today? What poses the single largest threat to America’s standing in the world? The answer to both questions is found in failures of the American political system. Ask the same questions of China and the answers are again the same: failures of governance. Honest observers in both societies are increasingly recognizing that neither 'decadent' democracy nor 'responsive' authoritarianism is fit for meeting the twenty-first century’s severest tests.
I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press—all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. As Abraham Lincoln warned prophetically, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline.
At the same time, I share Lee’s devastating critique of China’s 'operating system.' Technology is making its current system of governance obsolete. Young urbanites with smartphones cannot be sustainably governed by Beijing bureaucrats who track every citizen as part of an omnipresent 'social credit' system. Lee identified an array of handicaps China will not easily change: the absence of the rule of law; excessive control from the center; cultural habits that limit imagination and creativity; a language 'that shapes thinking through epigrams and 4,000 years of texts that suggest everything worth saying has already been said, and said better by earlier writers'; and an inability 'to attract and assimilate talent from other societies in the world.' His prescription was not American-style democracy (which he thought would lead to China’s collapse), but a recovery of traditional mandarin virtues in a government with a strong leader. On that front, Xi’s value-centered nationalism may help restore integrity to a Chinese OS that has been hollowed out by rank materialism.
To extend the digital metaphor, both rivals must also reconsider the fitness of their apps for the twenty-first century. In his book Civilization, Niall Ferguson identifies six 'killer apps'—ideas and institutions that drove the extraordinary divergence in prosperity between the West and the rest of the world after 1500. These are competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and work ethic. While noting China’s great reconvergence with the West since 1970, Niall wonders if China can sustain its progress without killer app number three: secure private property rights. I worry that the American work ethic has lapsed into mediocrity, while its consumer society has become decadent.
If the leaders in each society grasped the seriousness of the problems it faced on the home front and gave them the priority they deserved, officials would discover that devising a way to 'share the twenty-first century in Asia' was not their most serious challenge.
Will they recognize this reality? Will either or both nations summon the imagination and fortitude to meet their domestic challenges? If they do so, will they be skillful enough to secure their vital interests without stumbling to war? Statesmen seeking to do so will find no better place to start than in rereading Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.
Will they succeed? Ah, if we only knew. We do know, however, that Shakespeare was right: our destiny lies 'not in our stars, but in ourselves.'
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