How America And China Could Stumble To War…(Well Done…)

Saturday, April 15, 2017
By Paul Martin

by Graham Allison via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
ZeroHedge.com
Apr 15, 2017

Can Beijing and Washington escape the Thucydides Trap?

Would a Chinese leader barely in control of his own country after a long civil war dare attack a superpower that had crushed Japan to end World War II five years earlier by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? As American troops pushed North Korean forces toward the Chinese border in 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur could not imagine so. But Mao Zedong did. MacArthur was dumbstruck. Chinese forces rapidly beat American troops back to the line that had divided North and South Korea when the war began. That thirty-eighth parallel continues to mark the border between the two Koreas today. By the time the war ended, nearly three million had perished, including thirty-six thousand American troops.

Similarly, in 1969, Soviet leaders could not imagine that China would react to a minor border dispute by launching a preemptive strike against a power with overwhelming nuclear superiority. But that is precisely what Mao did when he started the Sino-Soviet border war. The gambit showed the world China’s doctrine of “active defense.” Mao sent an unmistakable message: China would never be intimidated, not even by adversaries that could wipe it off the map.

In the years ahead, could a collision between American and Chinese warships in the South China Sea, a drive toward national independence in Taiwan or jockeying between China and Japan over islands on which no one wants to live spark a war between China and the United States that neither wants? It may seem hard to imagine—the consequences would be so obviously disproportionate to any gains either side could hope to achieve. Even a non-nuclear war conducted mostly at sea and in the air could kill thousands of combatants on both sides. Moreover, the economic impact of such a war would be massive. A 2016 RAND study found that, after just one year, American GDP could decline by up to 10 percent and Chinese GDP by as much as 35 percent—setbacks on par with the Great Depression. And if a war did go nuclear, both nations would be utterly destroyed. Chinese and American leaders know they cannot let that happen.

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