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

NATIONAL BESTSELLER | NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR.

From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the conditions that could produce a catastrophic conflict between the United States and China and how it might be prevented.

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.

At the time of publication, an unstoppable China approached an immovable America, and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promised to make their countries "great again," the seventeenth case was looking grimit still is. 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 Trapand to explore the painful steps that might prevent disaster today.