America and China are in “the foothills of a Cold War,” Henry Kissinger told a Bloomberg News conference in Beijing in November. “So a discussion of our mutual purposes and an attempt to limit the impact of conflict seems to me essential. If conflict is permitted to run unconstrained the outcome could be even worse than it was in Europe. World War 1 broke out because a relatively minor crisis could not be mastered,” the former secretary of state added.
Kissinger’s analogy seems overwrought. For several reasons a Sarajevo-style trigger for conflict between the US and China is improbable. The European powers in 1914 had large standing armies ready to invade each other; if one power mobilized, its adversaries had no choice but to do so. As the Australian historian Christopher Clark demonstrated in his 2014 book The Sleepwalkers, Russia’s decision to mobilize irrevocably set the Great War in motion. The United States has a strong naval presence and military bases in East Asia, but nothing resembles the tenuous balance of power in Central Europe. China now has enough missiles to neutralize virtually all American assets in East Asia within hours of the outbreak of war, according to a recent evaluation by the University of Sydney. It also has the means to blind American military satellites, as Bill Gertz reports in his 2019 book Deceiving the Sky.
If the analogy to August 1914 in Europe seems strained, the popular “Thucydides Trap” argument comparing America and China to Sparta and Athens on the eve of the Peloponnesian War is even less appropriate. Athens and Sparta were unstable societies dependent on slaves and tribute, and had the capacity to destroy each other’s economic foundation in short order. Each side therefore had an incentive to initiate war. Game theory dictated a high probabilitly of war. No such vulnerability exists in Sino-American relations.
