Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know how much foreign relationships or China-US policy you follow but when it comes to China-US, the term "Thucylides' Trap" gets thrown around a bit ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/09/the-thucydides-trap/ - a term coined by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_T._Allison )

Rivalry between a rising power and an existing superpower is inevitable. How it gets resolved though is not certain.

China is on track to overtake the US economically in a decade or two (if you consider PPP adjusted GDP they've already surpassed us). That have implications in other areas too -- strategic, diplomatic, cultural, etc. How will the US respond to this? Will we simply let it happen or will we stop it and perhaps violently? What will it mean for our agendas in different areas since China and the US don't share the same goals in many areas. What's especially frightening to me is that Xi seems to advocate a view that China's rise is a return to a historical greatness and that China is destined to dominate -- similar in some sense to the old "manifest destiny" idea of the US. Xi's idea is now enshrined into the Chinese constitution along side Mao's ideas. My view is on this rather bleak but I think the US needs allies more than ever. Ironically I think two equally matched powers are more likely to come to a peaceful coexistence than if one side perceives the other to be weaker. Maybe a new cold (or cool-ish) war isn't so bad compared to a hot war.

never in our modern history has an up and coming superpower wanted or desired the mantle of top superpower.

the UK was economically beneath the US a full 3 decades before the US actually decided they wanted to be the world leading superpower. almost two years in a world war, and after a massive attack by the japanese empire did the US finally took the reigns.

the reason for this is that the top global superpower needs to have an extensive network of diplomacy and military, things that come with huge costs domestically. when you’re top dog, everyone looks at you for guidance and rules.

Its important to point out that American entry into WW2 did not establish American hegemony, but only accelerated it. Roosevelt had been supplying Allied forces with Material for a long time before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor (from historical records, its pretty clear that the Japanese understood it was only a matter of time before the US entered the war and thus attacked pre-emptively).

The event that solidified US as the superpower was actually the Suez crisis, where the UK and French had to begrudgingly agree to American demands, making it clear who was the top dog.

Kind of reminds me of how Nintendo decided with the Wii not to compete with Sony and Microsoft on graphics and raw compute capabilities. By offering a machine that was much cheaper to manufacture than Sony or Microsoft, Nintendo was able to solidly occupy the #3 spot in the market (on graphics quality) without huge expenses on hardware development. They intentionally chose not to compete for first place because it was so much more cost effective not to.

That seems to presume a lot about superpower motivations.

I think a more realistic assessment is that there is a high degree of uncertainty in the relative balance of power between two nations, made worse by nationalism, ethnocentrism, and the tendency of charismatic leaders to believe their own hype. Peaceful, commerce-based regimes - the ones most likely to become economic superpowers - tend to be risk averse when it comes to pushing geopolitical boundaries, because war destroys the economic development that led to them becoming superpowers. Militaristic or fundamentalist regimes tend to be risk-embracing, because you don't come to power as a militaristic regime unless the populace believes they can win (a belief which is often distorted in fundamentalist or fascist regimes).

WW2 proved that the U.S. was light years ahead of Japan's industrial capacity. This was known to Japanese military officers who had visited the U.S, but the ruling cabal in Japan discounted their assessment as impossible. Similarly, Cold War propaganda (in both the U.S. and Russia) painted them both as roughly equal superpowers, but we learned after the Iron Curtain fell that the Soviet Union was never really an economic threat to the U.S. The U.S. may have passed the UK as an industrial superpower in WW1, but in the eyes of much of the world they were still an unknown quantity, enough that Japan directed simultaneous attacks on Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaya at the same time as Pearl Harbor and the Philippines.

Its not clear what the ideological lines are though. With USSR, it was a very clear Capitalism v/s Communism ideological battle. Its not clear to me that the rivalry would escalate to the same levels as it did during the Cold War.

There is one thing that does give a lot of hope to me personally: the close economic relationship between the US and China has created a tight bond between the countries even if they are unwilling to admit it openly.

Its not inconceivable for world powers to co-exist in peace. There will be a lot more frontiers in the future that can be competed on without wanting to destroy one another.

Agreed, all other data points we have of the theuclydes traps did not have countries with as interconnected economies or cultures. Maybe I am over playing it a bit since I live in a densely Chinese populated area in US

There need not be an ideological conflict. Ideology was a mobilizing idea in the 20th century but has lost mindshare. France and Britain vied for centuries having similar societies and economies. There can be a tribal aspect to conflict, as well as simply a competition for the spoils of world dominance, which are many.

> Ideology was a mobilizing idea in the 20th century but has lost mindshare.

Ironic then that it is called the Thucydides trap then, since the ideological lines between Athens and Sparta were very stark indeed.

The "ideological" battle is largely just a matter of how conflict is packaged and sold to the general population, which doesn't have clear and obvious reasons to support empire building for its own sake. Such perceived conflicts are usually just pretense for the realpolitik, and can come and go as the empire's interests evolve.

Oh man. Your question really hits the nail on the head and what I think most people fail to realize about China's threat. China represents a form of capitalism divorced from democracy. Their message to the world is this: you can have a thriving, well-off authoritarian state at scale. We've had small successful authoritarian capitalistic states for a while now (Gulf States and Singapore). China is managing to do it at scale -- at Chinese scale at that. China is basically saying a model when people trade individual liberty and guaranteed human rights for security and prosperity is not only workable but even preferred. They're saying concentration of power in the hands of the few as long as those in power can give wealth and security to everyone else is the winning model. This to me is the real danger of China because of this allure of authoritarianism coupled with capitalism. I think people often forget that capitalism doesn't have to be tied to democracy and classical Western liberal ideas. There only needs to be just enough rule of law, property protection, and economic freedom for capitalism to flourish -- at least for the short term.

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